Account Security Verification

“Hi guys, Please excuse me if you have got any inappropriate mails from me. Seems like my account was hacked”..

How many times haven’t we got such mails from our contacts? wpte a few, we could say.
The phishing, hacking scam are at an all time high these days and its already making its way to the world’s biggest social network as well.
The antivirus companies are constantly and consistently publishing a lot of malware scam related things, asking people to be careful.
Recently we heard of the Sony Playstation Network hack, in which millions of passwords were stolen.
During such risky times, publishing of personal information by people are also at an all time high, thanks to the so called “open -web” concept.
Though the concept is wonderful, there are risks which someone has to address.
And, possibly someone, who has a lot of personal information at their hands for disposal.
And, seems like one of them, actually, has started one brilliant initiative.

Google.
2 step verification.

When heard for the first time, it does seem tedious.
We are all extremely irritated dealing with such verification, during online money transfers.
However, Google’s verification process seems to be wpte ahead of its generation.

Few things to be noted about it that might make users actually want to opt for it are these :

1) For any computer, 2 step verification is a one time activity for a maximum of 30 days.
Which means, only once in 30 days, you might have to do the 2 step verification.
After that, its just the normal password sign in.

2) 2 Step verification method also varies.(Convenient to Very convenient)
For someone who doesn’t own an Android phone or an iPhone, you have the SMS confirmation, where the number is sent to you.

For someone who owns one of the above smartphones, you have “an app for that”.
“Google Authenticator” – which, pretty much acts like a free RSA SecurID device.

Again, all these needs to be done, once in 30 days, per device.
i.e Desktop PC,Laptop, GMAIL app etc.

Now this is just the basic of the security feature for the Gmail application.
However, this doesn’t protect the Google account password, which is the same for almost every application that Google provides.

For that, there is another trick up the sleeve.

“Application specific passwords”

No, its not what you think it is.
We  do not set different passwords for every application that uses the google account ever !!
Although, its slightly similar to that.

Consider you have a chat client like Gtalk, or Trillian installed on your PC or Mac, and you do most of your IM with that.
So, in this case, you go to the Google Account Settings Page and then generate the application specific passwords for an application .
Say for instance,
Trillian –> You enter the name(which can be anything) and say generate.
It generates a random 16 letters as the password.
You use this password instead of your usual password to sign in to the application.

And this is done ONLY ONCE.

Once this is done, you do not have to enter the password again.
And even when you change your Google account password, you do not have to worry about updating the same for all the zillion apps you have been using.
Now that seems dumb, one might think.
But there is one tool, that provides you complete control over these applications.
If you feel, that some application is behaving out of the ordinary, all you need to do is to go to your Google Account settings page and just revoke the access to that particular app.
Then its history.

It does seem to be wpte a good verification process, one that provides more security than we currently have and also gives you more control over what needs to be managed and how, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out either. Its wpte simple to use.

P.S – Facebook also has one decent security feature. hen you try to login from another computer in another region(read country). It asks you to identify the people from your contacts, by showing you their pictures.
Good method, however the issue of using one’s photos to show it to somebody else is a lil intriguing when that person would’ve shared their photo to only a subset of people in their friend’s list,nevertheless, thats that !