Many people receive emails from known addresses asking for help in the form of money. This is obviously a scam but some might end up falling for it when they receive the mail from a good friend. This is not the greatest/most complicated email scam of alltimes, but the technique can be used to send a mail with an attachment that contains malware.
Gmail as added a new feature to tackle this scam.
How does the scam work?
- First, the email of a person is compromised by hacking into it.
- Then, email for help in form of money is asked to all contacts of the email account. This makes the email seem genuine because it is sent from a known contact.
How does Gmail plan to fight it?
Gmail plans to fight this problem by giving us a new feature which alarms us if our account has shown suspicious log in activity.
As shown in the image above, there will be a warning like this one if the account has been accessed from a foreign country, and a “Show details and preferences” link allows the user to see the details.
The link leads to a page that shows details, including IP addresses and country of recent activity. This can be useful, for you can immediately locate the unusual activity and change the password.
The information highlighted in red is the suspicious information. It can be ignored or acted upon if necessary. The only disadvantage with this new security system is if you travel a lot, and access your accounts from different computer and smart-phones, in different countries. If the connection is slow, then the extra application will end up wasting a lot of your time. Nevertheless, better safe than sorry. If I had had such a tool, I would still be having my Hotmail account (closed because it was being used by some crooks to send spams… including to me!!).
Go to Gmail blog for more information.
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