Gmail Launches a New Security Feature to Ensure Your Privacy

from Tech Review - The newly featured Gmail, launched by Google, doesn’t have any cool audio alert blaring out Intruder alert, it alerts the users of any suspicious activity in their e-mail account. Google hopes to help users combat the email frauds and identify the theft with the new feature. Pavani diwanji, Engineering Director of Gmail, posted a scenario that occurred to him on the blog: it seems a friend of his, who resided in London, asked him for some money to help him out, later on he found out that it was a scam mail who had hijacked his friend’s account.

Many businesses rely on Gmail as their primary messaging platform. Gmail assures that it will try its level best to stop socially engineered attacks and identify the thefts. Google has a security feature in which it displays the last date, time and location of the account but users may not pay enough attention to this feature. The new Google reaches certain criteria and range to identify the user’s behavior.

To determine when to display the “INTRUDER ALERT MSG”, the automated system matches the relevant IP address logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location. It doesn’t have the capability to determine the specific location from where the account is accessed, a session from one country occurring after a few hours from a session from another country may trigger the alert system. The notifications are just to alert any suspicious activity but are not a replacement of the account security. It’s a sage advice for the IT administrators, small and medium businesses that rely on Gmail. The suspicious activity alert is a nice feature but is not a comprehensive defense, IT ‘S NO SILVER BULLET. Businesses should ensure users of the new Gmail feature so they pay much more attention when they see it.