products
Much of our financial life has long since shifted from the physical world to the digital. Banking apps, digital wallets, online payments, and cryptocurrencies are all 21st-century innovations that make financial transactions faster and more accessible than ever before, opening up all kinds of hitherto unimaginable opportunities.
But this convenience has a downside: our digital finances are vulnerable to digital crimes. Then again, that’s only true if you neglect protecting your online finances from cybercriminals. This post takes a look at how Kaspersky technologies and products secure your digital money, and thus your financial well-being.
1. Password Manager
The backbone of all account security — and financial services are no exception — is, of course, your password. The weaker it is, the greater the chances of a successful hack on your account in some online store or payment system where you enter card details.
It’s just as dangerous to use the same password for different online services. If you do, then if there’s a password leak on one of them (all too common, sadly), your accounts with other services will be compromised as well. Hackers are well aware that many people use the same character combinations on multiple sites, so they often use leaked passwords to try to log in to other resources, a technique known as credential stuffing. And naturally, their focus tends to be on money-related services.
Using Kaspersky Password Manager radically improves password security and to keep your financial accounts safe. Our app generates unique, maximum-security passwords for every service you use, stores them safely so there’s no need to remember them, and even warns you about leaks. Incidentally, the latest update of Kaspersky Password Manager has added the ability to generate one-time codes for two-factor authentication. And you get it for free with Kaspersky Plus and Kaspersky Premium subscriptions.
2. Safe Money
Safe Money was designed specifically for enabling secure financial transactions and online purchases. To protect important payment data entered on the websites of banks, payment systems, and online stores — including bank card numbers and passwords — our solution prompts you to open such sites in our Protected Browser.
In this special mode, your confidential data is protected to the max. And if a site seems fishy in any way at all, Protected Browser warns you with a notification and a change of the frame color from safe green to yellow.
With Safe Money, you can do online shopping and banking safely in the knowledge that both your money and personal data are fully protected. This feature is included in all our paid subscriptions:Kaspersky Standard, Kaspersky Plus, and Kaspersky Premium.
3. File Anti-Virus
Of course, one of the central components of our multi-layered financial protection is good old Anti-Virus. This is what protects your money from the most dangerous threat: malware, in particular, so-called stealers, which, after infecting the target device, look for passwords and private keys to cryptocurrency wallets stored on it, then send them straight to the cyberthieves.
Another common threat directly related to finances that File Anti-Virus guards against is banking Trojans. These are viruses that overlay a banking app’s interface with its own and can’t only steal passwords but also intercept one-time confirmation codes, as well as substitute details and amounts of transfers and payments, allowing the cybercriminals to siphon off money.
These two threats alone are reason enough for you to install reliable protection on all devices you use for financial transactions. There are plenty of other dangers that Anti-Virus also protects against, such as ransomware Trojans and spyware to name just a couple.
4. Safe Browsing
Note that it might not be your computer or smartphone that’s infected with malware, but the server you’re interacting with. The first threat to worry about in this scenario would be online skimmers — malware that scammers install on hacked online stores in order to harvest customers’ bank card details.
Web skimmers have become very popular with cybercriminals of late — every year, tens of thousands of online stores are found to be infected with malware of this kind. Often, the owners of compromised stores are either unaware of the infection or take no action to neutralize a threat, so a web skimmer might remain active on an infected site for months. In practical terms, this means that even if you personally have been careful and your devices are all clean, you can still fall victim to cybercriminals simply by interacting with an infected website.
Fortunately, we also have a solution to protect you from web skimmers and other threats: Safe Browsing scans the pages loaded by your browser for malicious code and, if detected, warns you that the site is unsafe.
5. Anti-Phishing and Fraud Prevention
There’s no way we can skip over fake and fraudulent websites, which affect a huge number of internet users every year. These can be cloned sites mimicking banks, payment systems, crypto exchanges, or other financial services that trick visitors out of their credentials and then hijack their accounts.
They can also be online scams promising large payouts in exchange for a small commission, fake online stores with tempting prices that never deliver your purchase, or other types of online fraud.
The problem is that sites of this kind usually don’t directly contain any malicious code. To effectively protect against such threats, our experts work day and night to keep our database of phishing and fraudulent sites up to date. As a result, our solutions give you a heads-up in good time whenever danger is near.
Tips