October is a month of a lot of things in the tech world. It’s a month chock-full of phone launches, hardware events, and more. However, something a lot of you might not be aware of is that October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month as well. In light of that, if you are wondering how you can be safer on the internet, the first step is to ensure your Google Account is protected well. Fortunately, Google makes it easy to check your account for common security holes. Here’s how to run a Security Checkup on your Google account:
Run a Security Checkup on Google Account
A security checkup can show you places where you might need to manually intervene and fix things in order to ensure that only you can gain access to your email, Google services, and other Google connected accounts.
- Head over to the Google Security Checkup page.
- Google will run a few checks on your account settings and highlight places where you might need to make changes. As you can see, in my case, my Google account is apparently signed in on a device that I haven’t used in 115 days. If you see something similar, just click on the “Remove” button to remove your account from that device.
- Here, you can also see all the other devices that your Google account is signed in on. If you see an unrecognised device here, make sure you remove your account from the device.
- You can also see recent security events related to your Google account. These are things like sign-ins on new devices. If you see something you don’t recognise, you should click on the “Don’t recognize an event” link on the bottom to fix the problem.
- Then there’s the third-party app access section where you can see all the apps and websites that have access to your Google account in any capacity. I would recommend you go through this list and remove any apps or websites that you either don’t recognize, or don’t use any more.
Running a Security Checkup on your Google Account is the simplest way to run a basic security check on your account settings, and make sure you’re not signed in on any devices that you don’t own.
Note: If you see a device you don’t recognize on this list, I would suggest that you remove it and also change your Google Account password for safety purposes.
Run a Security Checkup on Your Google Account on Android
If you’re using an Android phone, you don’t really need to go to any webpages or anything. You can perform the security checkup on your phone directly. Just follow the steps below:
- On your phone, to go Settings and tap on “Google Account“. Here, head over to the “Manage Your Account” button at the top.
- In the page that opens up, swipe over to the “Security” tab, and tap on “Secure account“
- You’ll now be able to see the same Security Checkup page and you can make sure your account is secure. As you can see, Rupesh has a lot of work to do securing his account, but you shouldn’t let the situation get this out of hand and secure your account as soon as possible.
Make Sure Your Google Account is Secure
As you can see, running a security checkup on your Google Account is fairly straightforward, and although it’s not compulsory, I would suggest that you run this security check every few weeks in order to ensure that your account is safe from hackers, and to identify any potential security risks to your account.
Abubakar Mohammed
