Rocky: Hii Tom, How are you?
Tom: I'm fine, what about you?
Rocky: I'm also fine, why are you looking worried?
Tom: Someone has hacked my Gmail Account. I had a very important business e-mails in that account, and now everything is open to my rivals.
Rocky: It's so sad Tom, don't worry and make new Gmail account.
Tom: I had trust on Google therefore I made account in that, but now it's gone.
Rocky: Tom, it's not the fault of Google. Google always keeps advising to the account holders about the tips of protecting account. Perhaps you didn't follow.
Tom: Yeah, you are right. Can you tell me some tips to protect if you know?
Rocky: Always provide your phone number with your e-mail account. This is useful because you’ll then receive an SMS text message whenever someone tries to recover your Google password. Setting secondary e-mail is also very useful option.
Tom: These are the simple methods, can't you tell me something unique?
Rocky: Once in a while, do refer to that little line in the footer section of your Gmail Inbox that shows the different IP addresses from where youraccount is being accessed. If you find an unknown IP address, change your Google password immediately. The person who hacked my Gmail accounts configured them with his Hotmailaccount so he could effectively read all my email communication remotely from his Hotmail inbox without ever logging into my Google account again. I could figure that out only after I saw an IP address from a Microsoft server in my Gmail activity log.
You should also consider copying emails from Gmail to another service (like Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail – it is effortless) so when your Gmailaccount is compromised, you at least have access to all your previous emails. Or you can configure a desktop email client like Outlook or Thunderbird with your Gmailaccount (via POP3 or IMAP) and thus you’ll have an automatic offline backup of your Gmail Inbox.
Do a test run. Log-out of all your Gmail / Google Accounts and initiate the password recovery process for each one of them using this form. This will help you make sure that your SMS settings and secondary email addresses are configured correctly.
Tom: What, if we are using Google Applications?
Rocky: You should always have a public email address on your website that others can use to contact you directly. This public email address will also help people find and connect with your on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. However, you should make sure that you don’t provide administrative privileges to this email address in Google Apps because if someone hijacks thisaccount , he will effectively take over your Google Apps domain. Create a new user in Google Apps as an administrator and never share this username with anyone else.
If you have lost access to your Google Apps dashboard, you’ll have to create a new CNAME record pointing to google.com to verify that you are actual owner of that web domain. To reset the password for the administrator of your Google Apps domain via your domain hosting company, the URL is:
https://google.com/a/cpanel/xyx.com/VerifyAdminAccountPasswordReset
[*] Replace xyz.com with your own domain address.
Tom: Great Rocky, how did you get all these facts?
Rocky: I got some hints through Google Administrator in my e-mail and also read some remaining points in http://labnol.org/ .
