Surely the recent publication of five million Gmail access data has motivated many users to change their password and seek more security measures. Surely it is a coincidence, but from today Google has a new security setup wizard for our account, with which we can follow some of the practices recommended by experts. The wizard appears as a new section on the Google security page, and in reality it does not bring anything new, it simply takes care of collecting the functions already available in such a way that it is easier for us to find and activate them. And it is not important that developers implement these measures if we do not know how to activate them or even that they exist.
Avoid hackers
To start the wizard we just have to go to the Google security page, and in the section Protect your account we just have to click on Start. Then we can follow various steps, the first of them set up an alternate phone number and email address with which we can recover the account in case of theft; Google does not say so, but it is preferable that this account is not from Gmail but from an alternative service (not to put all the eggs in the same basket, and such things).
The next step is to review recent activity; in a list we will be able to see the last devices that have been connected to our account and when and from where they have done it; Unless it is personal, a hacker will access our account from a proxy in countries such as Russia or China. If we see any suspicious start we can notify Google; if everything is correct we can go to the next step, disable access to less secure applications.
This means that if we use our account in apps we can force them to use the most secure protocols; in the most common cases you will not have problems, but Google warns that you may be using less secure communications if you have older devices with iOS 6 or Windows Phone prior to version 8.1, as well as some versions of email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook. If we click on Disable we will prevent such apps from connecting to our account.
Finally, touch check the permissions we have enabled on devices and apps who use our account. If we have used our Google account to log into an app, or have associated it with an Android device, it will appear in this list. We can see exactly what personal data they are able to access, and we can revoke the permissions with a single click.
Source | Google Account Protection | Google Operating System