By Dan Gay, CMO BlockCerts

As we have all heard, Elon Musk wants to “authenticate all real humans” on Twitter. Why? Well, if you look at the company feedback, over 5% of users are bots or fake accounts. Some researchers say it could be as high as three times that!

Bots, fake accounts, and fraud happen every second on Twitter, in fact, their in-house detection removes over a half-a-million spam accounts every day. These bots can mislead conversations, take you to a fraudulent and malicious phishing page, collecting or exposing your data, digital identity theft, viruses and ransomeware attacks.

Centralized Apps a Key Hacking Playground

It’s not just Twitter, Centralized Apps generate more than 80% of mobile fraud (RSA Security). While we’ve gone mobile, so have the hacksters. Hackers can easily get in under the hood of your phone through an app and create a nightmare across apps, your identity, banking and make your life miserable.

As I’ve said in the past, we’re in a digital fraudster’s world with over $6B in digital fraud per year, moving to over $10.5 Trillion by 2030.

A Hackers Paradise - Global Digital Traffic is growing by 28%

Statista just released global data traffic from 2017 to 2022, which tells the exposure story where hackers are targeting. In 2018, global mobile data traffic was 19 exabytes per month. IN just 4 years, that has grown to over 77.5 exabytes per month globally, and at an annual compounded growth rate of 46%!

Elon is Right, Authentication is the Key

Before 1970, money laundering and criminal behavior became an issue that moved Congress to act. In 1970 Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act, and also knows as the Anti Money Laundering Act, as the first law to fight money laundering in the United States.

Customer Due Diligence and Customer Identification Program (CIP) became important components to “authenticate” customers. Also known as KYC, “Know Your Customer”, which is now a standard process in banking and finance across the world. What is required is a government ID, a copy of a bill and address, and other information to verify the person.

It’s amazing to me that the mortgage industry, insurance industry and many industries still require antiquated processes to verify a person including copying a driver’s license and signing in a notary’s book. Today, we’ve come a long way from the paper process of the past to go digital, but most industries are still not there yet.

BlockCerts developed the patent for Secure Virtual Space Technology, which included an authentication solution called IDCERTin. IDCERTin is embedded into the BlockCerts platform and integrated into the wallet, the apps and private key protected. Know that who you’re working with is

How do we fight back? How do we protect ourselves? Where do we start?

1). Botometer Botometer is free. It’s a tool developed by Indiana University through their Observatory on Social Media. The tool will analyze your Twitter account activity for markers to provide a score that will show you if there is bot activity on your account.

2). ORBITi ORBITi is free. From the moment that you enter the internet, you need to protect yourself. What if you didn’t have to worry about being tracked, having adds posted in front of you, eliminating spam, phishing and spoofing attacks? ORBITi has you covered and it’s free! You can still search in the browser, which is connected to Google, but you don’t get all of the junk that comes with it.

Want to check if a link address is real or suspicious? Just copy and paste it into the browser before opening it to get a better read on it.

3). BCERTin Wallet BCERTin is Free. Just click on the mega menu on the top right and click on your operating system for free download. The BCERTin wallet allows you to set up your private web, through “Authentication”. This requires 2 inexpensive tokens. Yes, this is the component that Elon is striving for: upload government ID, take a selfie, facial recognition match, and authenticate yourself.

With this wallet, you can access a suite of “Apps” you can use without paying for monthly app charges AND since everything you do is protected via your private key, hackers have no home here!

4). IDCERTin

BlockCerts developed the patent for Secure Virtual Space Technology, which has the integrated authentication solution called IDCERTin. IDCERTin is embedded into the BlockCerts platform and into the BCERTin wallet, the decentralized apps and is private key protected. You get IDCERTin with everything you do.

If you’re a company that needs the latest KYC and authentication technology, IDCERTin can be used as a stand-alone solution, as a Use Case tailored solution, or just use the tools available right now!

5). Invite and Protect Your Friends

By changing how you communicate, how you work, store your passwords, send files, host web calls, you can protect yourself, but also your friends.

BlockCerts has a promotion in December that for every 2 friends you invite, they receive a BCERT token and you receive a token, for free. So, you not only protect your friends and keep everything safe on-line, you also will save each of you a lot of money and remove the risks that are present on “the exposed web”.

Get started by Downloading numbers 2 and 3 above, buy a few tokens to authenticate yourself, set up your “vault” and start living in the new world of Web 4.0