If the story of technology reporter Mat Honan having his iCloud account broken into and his iPad, iPhone and MacBook pro remotely wiped by a pair of hackers interested in his Twitter account scares you, then you should be. What should have you really quaking in your boots is the fact that they were able to get in via his Gmail account.
Fortunately, there’s a way to put a barrier between your Gmail account and any bad people out there on the Internet. It’s called two-factor authentication and it’s incredibly easy to set up.
What two-factor authentication means is that instead of merely inputting your username and password (something you know) you enter in a code from something you have, usually your phone.
To turn on two-factor authentication, simply go into your Google account and turn it on. You’ll be prompted to set up a device to use for the “something you have” part. You can either send a text message or voice call to your phone, or you can use the Google Authenticator app on your Android, BlackBerry, or iOS devices.
When you log into your Google account, you’ll also be prompted to enter the code that’s been sent to your device at the same time before you can log in. This can help you if your password falls into the wrong hands. Most likely, an attacker won’t have your phone. If you don’t want to do this every time you log in, check the “trust this computer” box.
If you’re worried about what will happen if your device is lost, stolen, or gets run over by a truck. You can print out a list of codes to stick in your wallet as a backup.
If you use desktop-based clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, you can set up trusted passwords to use with Gmail as well. Just go to the “authorizing applications and sites” section of your Google account page and go down to the Application-specific password section. Pick a name for your password, then click “next.” You’ll then be given a password to paste into your client that you won’t have to remember.
By the way, if you use the same password for everything, you should probably stop doing that. There are tools like LastPass that will generate and remember secure passwords so you don’t have to.
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