Bitdefender now has identity protection for Gmail and Outlook

Bitdefender has upgraded its Digital Identity Protection feature, as it now integrates with Gmail and Outlook.

The antivirus vendor’s identity theft protection service monitors the dark web to see if a user’s personal information has been stolen and leaked by hackers. Now, Digital Identity Protection connects with Google‘s Gmail and Microsoft Outlook.

Bitdefender claims that the new integrations “vastly expand the monitoring reach of the service, adding hundreds more websites and services which increase the visibility of a users’ digital identity footprint including old accounts that may have been forgotten.”

Identity theft protection

Bitdefender claims that identity theft poses a real threat to users, citing data from the FTC that consumers lost $10bn last year to fraud – a 14% increase over 2022. The Identity Theft Resource Center also reported that there were over 3,000 publicly reported data compromises last year as well, impacting over 350m people.

“Each time passwords, and personal or financial information are entered in an app or website for shopping, banking, healthcare and social media – netizens inadvertently heighten their exposure to identity-related crimes like data breaches and extortion,” said Ciprian Istrate, senior vice president, Bitdefender Consumer Solutions Group.

He added that with the firm’s Digital Identity Protection service, users are alerted when their sensitive information may have been breached, allowing them to “quickly act by changing passwords, deleting accounts, or freezing credit cards before a serious incident occurs.”

It monitors the use of personal information, such as emails addresses, passwords, credit cards, SSNs, and phone numbers. The service also lets users see a copy of the personal data another company or service holds on them, and they can even request for their entire data to be deleted.