[App Fridays] This cyber-risk assessment app reveals dark web exposure, keeps you safe online

These days, your phone is your one-stop shop. It’s what helps you communicate, shop, stay entertained, pay bills, and order food and groceries, and more. In this digital world, safety is paramount. But how can you stay safe amidst the many data breaches and cybercrimes?

SAFE Me is here to help. Launched this month by cybersecurity startup Lucideus Technologies, SAFE Me is a cyber-risk quantification platform helps you learn, assess, and improve your cybersecurity awareness.

At the time of launch, Saket Modi, CEO, Lucideus, explained that an average consumer is tech-savvy to a point, but cybersecurity is perhaps their weakest area of expertise. They can accurately report battery life percentage and share gigabytes of data usage, but the vast majority would not know if you ask them to quantify their cyber-risk.

SAFE Me leverages Lucideus' proprietary 'breach likelihood scoring algorithm', which was built as joint research with MIT.

The app has already garnered more than 10,000 installs on the Play Store, with a rating of 4.9 stars out of five. It is available on both, iOS and Play Store, and the company claims that more than 30,000 users are already using the app.

Let’s get started

Sign up with your email ID, preferably one you use the most. Set the password and get verified with a verification code sent to your mail address. 

The best part about the app so far is that it does not seek any special permission or access any data on the phone, and discovers risk by breaches associated with your email ID.

The app, which has extremely impressive UI, quickly quantifies your ‘exposure’ to virtual threats or vulnerabilities. The ratings are from zero to five; the lower the rate, the higher the risk. The homescreen gives your SAFE Me score and mentions the risk level. This keeps changing as the app is AI-enabled and is constantly updating and scanning. 

SAFE Me also does a risk assessment for the device, and highlights if the user needs to upgrade the operating system or if device controls such as screen locks are secure (green dot) or not (red dot). The same screen also displays the number of dark web exposures. 

The dark web, a part of the internet not visible to search engines, requires the use of anonymous tools to access it. The higher the number of dark web exposures, the more vulnerable you are or have been.  

When we clicked on the dark web exposures, the app unfurled list of breaches, each time our data was exposed. We could see some popular apps and even passwords we had earlier, meaning they were leaked when data of a particular app was breached.

The app also suggests what steps you can take next to secure yourself with each exposure detection.

Learn and score

The app focuses on quantifying cybersecurity risks as an individual, and makes you more informed with easy, topic-wise consumable videos.

As Saket says, SAFE Me is designed to help consumers re-engineer their cyber-consciousness.

The awareness tab, a book icon at the bottom of the homescreen, is the most impressive part of the app. It features short interactive courses to educate yourself on how to use apps and devices safely.

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These courses are short three to five-minute videos explaining how to stay safe when using popular apps such as WhatsApp, BHIM, Gmail, Paytm, and Google Pay. Some also unravel safety aspects when using devices like an iPad.

Taking these courses - available in English and Hindi at present - improves your SAFE Me score. Taking quizzes and providing correct answers also increases your score.

Device, connection, and plans

The middle tab in the homescreen - a phone icon - lets you see if all the controls and connections in the phone are safe or not. For instance, our NFC was enabled, and the app suggested why it was not safe and revealed steps that could disable or make it safer.

SAFE Me is available in three versions, basic, enterprise, and platinum, to suit a diverse range of consumer and business-level cybersecurity needs. 

The basic version of the app is free, and offers a lot – without ads. You can upgrade by going to the profile tab; the enterprise version costs $ 36 per employee annually, and the platinum version - targeted at high-profile executives - is priced at $ 10,000 per year.

Another impressive feature in today’s times is that the app lets you delete your account.

The verdict

SAFE Me isn’t your regular device security app. It is an extremely sophisticated app that helps users assess their vulnerability in the virtual world, and educate themselves about cybersecurity concepts for all things digital.

We loved the design of the app and the fact that it offers so much in a smart manner. In fact, we could not find any flaw in the first few days of its use. The video-based micro-learning courses are very impressive and useful.

The easy-to-use mobile app can change the way people secure and protect their digital life. It not only caters to Generation X and Y, but also enables older generations to stay safe online.

We totally recommend this app to keep a tab on your vulnerabilities and stay protected in the big bad world the internet can be. 

The last word: Don’t freak out when you see your dark web exposures and your leaked passwords.