Suspicious login protection extended to all Google accounts

[nsane.forums]

When your credit card gets too much activity from random parts of the world, your bank usually shuts it off, or at least gives you a call to make sure all those charges are legit. Now, Google is implementing a similar strategy across all elements of your Google account: if the company detects what it considers to be suspicious logins for your Gmail, Google Calendar, Blogger, Buzz, or other Google accounts, it will flag your dashboard and let you decide how to proceed.

Google has been doing this for Gmail users for several months already, following the high-profile attack on Google's servers coming out of China. Numerous Gmail users—especially those who were of particular interest to the Chinese government—found that their accounts had been accessed by people overseas. As a result, Google decided it was a good time to start flagging users when their accounts were accessed from geographic locations that did not seem to be normal, and it has apparently been working so well that the company decided to add the feature to all Google accounts.

According to Google Engineering Director Pavni Diwanji, your Google Dashboard will now display a warning in red if there have been suspicious logins made to any of your Google accounts. "Suspicious" in this case means a login coming from outside the general geographic location of your normal IP address.

"If you log in using a remote IP address, our system will flag it for you," wrote Diwanji. "So if you normally log into your account from your home in California and then a few hours later your account is logged in from France, you'll get a notice like the one above at the top of your Dashboard page - alerting you to the change and providing links for more details."

Don't worry: Google won't automatically shut you out just because you checked your Google Calendar in San Francisco before flying to Beijing. You get to decide whether the questionable login was kosher or not by either changing your password on the spot or dismissing the warning. If you want to know further details about the suspicious logins, Google even allows you to see a list of IP addresses that have recently accessed your account:

It may seem like overkill for some users, but increasing numbers of us are using our Google accounts to conduct work-related business, private communications, and more. At the very least, you wouldn't want a scammer accessing your contact list and sending out messages to your friends pretending to be you, right?

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