Gmail Accounts Leak: How to Protect Yourself From Information Loss

News travels fast and most likely you have already heard about leaking of Gmail usernames and passwords for multiple accounts. For most of the users this can be simply unpleasant fact, but for the owners of online store this might turn to real disaster, since their mailboxes can contain personal information on their clients access or payment details.

Though, most of the sources say that lots of information posted online was outdated, caution is the parent of safety, so consider taking appropriate measures to ensure that your mailbox and client info are protected.

What to Do to Grant Gmail Account Security?

• Check if your mail was accessed from unusual locations (IP). At the bottom of your account page click ‘Details’ to view activity log.

• You can use online tools to check if your Gmail account is in the list of published online.
– If you aren’t comfortable giving out your email, you can change all your passwords. Moreover, usage of strong passwords are not enough, it is advisable to you’ve enable two-step authentication –

https://support.google.com/2-step-verification

• Enable auto-clear of your mails with some particular label or keyword each recurring period of time. For example, if customers send you some sensitive data, they can be automatically deleted in case you have forgotten to do it manually.

This is not so easy, but possible using Google Scripts. You need to:

1. Save Auto-Purge Script into your Google Drive, example you can find here –

http://ctrlq.org/bulk-delete-gmail

GMAIL_LABEL denotes that all mails with defined label, let’s say ‘Password’ (you need to beforehand have label created) will be cleared after the indicated number of days (PURGE_AFTER).

2. Then in your Google Drive click Run -> Initialize and make sure that you have indicated necessary permissions to perform the action.
3. Go to Run -> Install to install the auto-purge script.

Follow these few steps and further protect Gmail accounts to stop being worried about security.

You know what would be awesome? The ability to access your gmail from predefined list of IPs. Hope, this possibility will be implemented some day.

How do you protect yourself and your sensitive data? Share your thoughts.