Cyber security provider F-Secure has begun to roll out F-Secure ID PROTECTION and five operator partners around the world have already signed up to protect their consumer customers’ identities. First announced in May of 2019 and now available as planned, the service monitors for data breaches and can detect if an individual’s personal information has been exposed.

ID PROTECTION boasts the industry’s fastest breach detection and response times, meaning consumers can immediately react to these types of threats and lower the risk of identity theft and account takeover. This is equally important from a connected home and consumer internet of things (IoT) perspective as those devices and services are increasingly used via the cloud.

ID PROTECTION is an app-based solution that notifies users immediately when it detects exposed personal information with precise recommendations on how best to deal with the situation. The service also includes an easy-to-use password manager that helps consumers use unique, strong passwords across the digital services they use. This ensures that a single service getting breached doesn’t automatically mean an individual’s entire digital life or connected home is compromised, and also assists in creating new passwords for services that were breached.

“Our customers recognize that all these great new online services come with risks. And even if consumers do everything they can to secure themselves, their data can still be exposed via a breach. This is something that more than 50% of consumers worry about today,” says Antero Norkio, Vice President of Product Management, Consumer Security at F-Secure. “No one can keep up or be ready to respond to every data breach in the very short time window when damage can be minimized or avoided. That’s where F-Secure ID PROTECTION comes in.”

Over half of consumers (56%) worry about the loss of personal information in a data breach and more than seven in ten (71%) feel they’re likely to be victims of cyber crime or identity theft.*

These fears are well founded given the poor data security practiced by many consumers, with eight in ten (82%) saying they reuse their passwords.** Recycled passwords multiply the risks to customers’ data when a leak occurs.

“ID PROTECTION is the perfect complement to our Connected Home Security solution. It’s the opposite side of the same coin,” says Kristian Järnefelt, Executive Vice President, Consumer Security at F-Secure. “Securing your devices and detecting if there are anomalies in your home network is essential, yet it doesn’t protect your data when it ends up in the cloud.  By combining human intelligence with dark web scanning, data breaches can be detected everywhere, much faster than it is by services that use dark web scanning alone.”

F-Secure’s recent consumer survey indicates people’s willingness to pay for ID monitoring services to be quite similar to how they purchase malware and endpoint protection.*

“We see tremendous opportunity for our 200+ operator partners worldwide to offer ID PROTECTION as a stand-alone, bundled with a broadband subscription value-added service or combined with our other security products,” says Järnefelt. “Looking at our global consumer survey results, we’re seeing a high willingness to pay for ID PROTECTION service and buy the solution through our operators, so we’re thrilled our partners are seizing this chance to protect their customers.”