Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Make Your Gmail Harder to Break Into

If you have a phone (not even a cell phone is necessary) or access to paper and a pencil, you could be using 2 factor authentication with Gmail and other Google services... well, if you only have paper and pencil it's not strictly speaking going to be 2 factor, but 2 part, one-time use passwords, which is almost as good.

I could go into a step by step of how to do it, but Google has already done that for me, with videos and screenshots and everything, just follow the link below.

http://goo.gl/qpY26





I just set my account up, added my cell phone as an SMS phone I could receive codes at, my home phone # as a backup voice phone I could receive codes at, copied the one-time use passwords for emergencies into a keypass file, and set up Google Authenticator on my blackberry. It took all of 10-15 minutes to do and I have 2 factor auth with several backup options in case I lose my Blackberry phone. ...so I can feel even more sure somone will not be able to easily hack my Google account from the Ukraine or somewhere else where hackers are plentiful, but also confident that I am not going to lose access to it myself.

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