MonitR®: A Mobile Application for Monitoring Online Accounts' Security

As the internet grows, there is a rise in the dangers online accounts encounter whose potential harm can be severe. Online account users might use their accounts for various purposes such as: shopping, banking, social media and several other things. Usability is mostly the only concerned output; leaving the security of these accounts as an afterthought. A user's account might be compromised and misused by an attacker with various motivations ranging from financial to just having fun. One of the dangers that online users face when they sign up for accounts is impersonation. This paper presents a novel approach that gives users control of their account login and usage by creating a mobile application that monitors activities on a user's account. In so doing, the application can be able to decipher a fraudulent user from a legitimate user and send notification reports to legitimate users whenever there is a compromise from a malicious user. The application collects information such as location account is logged in from, device used for logging in, operating system, date and time of log in. Using the user's current location and following a set of fraud rules set by the user, reports are generated whenever the account is compromised. The user can then take action, like block device, set a geofence to control logging or lock account. The result of this approach is to prevent impersonations in online accounts and allow the user to set his/her own security policies.