Google Alerts Against Spammers and Hijackers

By: Zain Nabi  |   February 21st, 2013   |   Google

There is no dearth of spammers and hijackers constantly trying to reach you through a number of channels, but Google has taken some strict measures to limit their access to its users, especially during the last couple of years in which it has significantly reduced the number of compromised accounts.

 

According to Google’s official blog, the company has taken a number of steps to ensure that an account is being used by the actual user. If any suspicious activity is noticed, the company actively takes some steps to determine if the actual user is really using the account. For example, if you are logging in from a different computer (with a different IP address) for the first time, it might ask you some relevant questions so as to ensure that somebody else is not using your account. There is not just one variable to judge it. The blog says:

 

“Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.”

 

It continues:

 

“If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, we’ve dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.”

 

While these are the measures that Google takes for its users, the company urges the users to ensure privacy and security of their accounts on their own as well. A user must not use common passwords that can be easily guessed by others. In fact, they must try to come up with a strong and unique password that should only be known to them. Apart from using a strong password there are some other ways to secure your account. They include “upgrading your account to use 2-step verification, and updating the recovery options on your account such as your secondary email address and your phone number.”