Applications Designed to Secure your Phone

In this video, we’re going to be taking a look at some applications designed to help secure your smartphone. So as we learned previously, it is important to secure your smartphone. After all, we do keep a lot of things on our phone, things like our calendar, social media, photos, email, private communications to other people, and so on. So let’s take a look at some applications that could help us secure this. So the first one I want to show you is anti-viruses. So there are a lot of anti-viruses for Android at least– Avast, Malwarebytes, Norton, Bitdefender, Avira, and whatnot. And when it comes to Android phones, I think it is important to actually have some sort of antivirus on there.

So the antivirus will work largely like an antivirus on a computer. It’ll check your phone or device for virus signatures. A lot of times, these things will also do additional functions. Things like look for malware, possibly, store information like your passwords or whatnot. And again, it’s an antivirus tool. So the general function is looking for suspicious programs on your device. Now, you’re not going to see this too much for iPhone, if at all. So again, it’s going to be mainly for Android phones. And when you do look for antivirus, I recommend that you go with a reputable vendor, something like Malwarebytes is reputable, Avira, Bitdefender, Norton, Kaspersky, what not. Those companies have been around a long time.

They actually make desktop counterparts. So you do want to be vigilant that it is a legitimate piece of software and not a program that’s going to potentially steal your information, because there has been a fake anti-viruses out there on the App Store. Now the next program we’re going to take a look at is, I’ll demonstrate on iPhone, but it is also for Android. And it’s Last Pass. Now Last Pass is also a program for your Windows vice OSX and whatnot. And they do a cloud based versions. Now, Last Pass allows you to do things like store your password, store your addresses, store secure notes, bank account information, payment card information, and whatnot. And it’s in an encrypted format.

So either you could type a password in, or on the iPhone you could do the Face ID or thumbprint ID. And this is a handy way to keep all your passwords or nodes or contacts in a secure environment. So if your device goes missing, someone can’t just flip through your contacts and whatnot, take a look at it. They’ll actually be encrypted in this program itself. So the program is free. There is a premium version that unlocks additional features. But it’s a really good addition to have on your mobile device. Next up, we have Cloudflare. And Cloudflare is also known as 1.1.1.1, which is a DNS service.

So DNS allows when you’re looking for traffic, normally, when you go to, say, google.com or msn.com or whatnot, addresses are actually IP numbers. Like Google, for example, is 8.8888. So what DNS does makes it easier for us to remember. Instead of remembering all these numbers to get to a website, DNS actually takes that information, converts it over for us. So the problem with DNS is, if we go out to a website, our ISP, or whoever we’re connecting through, can actually see that traffic. They know where we’re going. So what Cloudflare is designed as, it’s designed a route through their DNS service where they’re not supposed to be checking out this traffic.

They’re not supposed to be logging where routes are specifically going. And it’s pretty fast service. This also helps us with, potentially help us with, things like malicious users taking that information. So Cloudflare, it’s a pretty simple app once you install it. You simply click it on, and it’ll start riding traffic to the Cloudflare DNS. Now there is a premium version where they have a program called WARP built-in, which is essentially a VPN which we’ll talk about a little bit later.