By some estimates as many as 1 in 4 people claim to have had one of their online accounts hacked, something that Israeli startup LogDog is on a mission to help stop. It offers a mobile app (currently Android, with iOS to follow soon) that promises to monitor an array of online accounts for suspicious login or attempted login activity.
It does this, in part, by building a profile of your usual log in parameters, such as sign-in locations, times, and device types, and then alerts you of any suspicious activity. It’s then up to you whether or not to change the password for that particular account, ignore the attempt or, in the case of a false-positive, tell LogDog that it was in fact you.
Technically the way the app works is that you give it permission to log in on your behalf to the accounts that you wish to monitor — Facebook, Dropbox, Gmail, Evernote, Yahoo!, and Twitter are supported — and from there it continually monitors those accounts via their own respective activity logs for anything suspicious. It is worth noting, however, that LogDog takes 7 days to train itself after installing the app before you start receiving notifications.
But don’t lots of individual services already do this, you might ask. Well, yes. However, LogDog is able to go a lot deeper because it can build a more thorough profile of your usual activity since it pulls data from multiple accounts.
Perhaps you’ve been known to access your Gmail from the U.K. and Germany, but on a particular day LogDog notices you accessed Gmail from London and Facebook in Berlin in the space of an hour. That couldn’t possibly be you, something that each silo’d service would never be aware of. It also provides a neat way to know if you forgot to log out somewhere and somebody else is accessing your email.
To further its mission, LogDog has raised $3.5 million in new funding to be used to expand R&D efforts, and roll out additional features. The round was led by BRM Group and includes existing investors TheTime VC, FirstTime Ventures, Maxfield Capital and Curious Minds Investments.
The startup’s apps are free to use but LogDog plans to charge for additional features and premium support.