With more than 1.8 billion active accounts, Gmail is not only one of the most used services online but one of the most targeted by hackers. It's not hard to understand why, as Gmail soaks up around half of all email client usage by U.S. market share. Compromise a Gmail account and a threat actor, whether their motive is criminal profit or surveillance-driven, can expect to harvest plenty of information to help their cause: everything from password reset notifications to details of online transactions. This is why taking basic steps to secure your Google account is so essential. Not all Gmail hackers will change your password and lock you out of your Google account immediately. Although this gives them time to exfiltrate valuable data and potentially reset passwords for other online accounts and services, it's not the only option available to a threat actor. Such a tactic does depend on the account holder not knowing an unauthorized person is accessing their Gmail. Scroll to the bottom of your Gmail inbox and find a feature called last account activity. This will immediately inform you of the time of the previous access to Gmail and whether it is being accessed from a different location. You'll need to click through this to open the complete activity monitor to get the full access picture. Get into the habit of checking this out every time you use Gmail and you'll be able to spot any unauthorized access quickly. Google will also send notifications about any unusual sign-ins to your account, new devices added to your account or changes to security settings. Head to your Gmail settings and click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Most users never delve this far into Gmail settings as it is too technical for them and Gmail is so popular because it's also so easy to use. Like the recent account activity feature I'd recommend you get into the habit of checking your forwarding status regularly. This is also where someone could add access to a third-party email client using the POP or IMAP protocol, which, combined with your account password, also gives them stealthy access to your inbox. MORE FROMFORBES ADVISOR. Google provides a freely available and powerful tool to check your account security. The Google Account Security Check-Up brings together many valuable options for securing access to Gmail. Here, you can discover if there have been changes to account recovery options, applications and services that have been granted access to your account, whether you have 2FA activated and what systems you are using to provide it and sensitive Gmail settings. The latter can include reply-to addresses different from your account default, sent-from addresses that are also different and any addresses that have been blocked and so go straight to your spam folder.
This Cyber News was published on www.forbes.com. Publication date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:19:27 +0000