Stay safe online
Google’s security tools
Here are some examples of Google’s security tools that make users safer on the web.
2-step verification
When you leave your house, you feel a bit safer knowing that the door’s locked. But imagine how much safer you’d feel if the door was guarded too? The same goes for the information in your Google Accounts. By switching on 2-step verification, you’ll have not one, but two security measures to help prevent someone from breaking in.
Once you’ve created
a password for your Google Account, you can add an extra layer of security by enabling
2-step verification. 2-step verification requires you to have access to your phone,
as well as your username and password, when you sign in. This means that if someone
steals or guesses your password, the potential hijacker still can’t sign in to your
account, because they don’t have your phone. Now you can protect yourself with something
you know (your password) and something you have (your phone).
Gmail SSL encryption
Gmail was the first major web mail provider to offer session-wide SSL encryption by default, which helps to protect your emails from being snooped on by others using your Internet connection (like at a Wi-Fi hotspot). We’ve also extended SSL to many services, including web search, Docs, Picasa and others.
Safe Browsing in Chrome
One of the most
important things that you can do to stay safe online is to use a safe web browser. We built
Google Chrome specifically to help protect your security and your privacy while you’re on the
Internet.
Google Chrome includes features to help protect you and your computer from malicious websites as you browse the web. Chrome uses technologies such as Safe Browsing, sandboxing and auto-updates to help protect you against phishing and malware attacks.
Safe Browsing API
To help protect you from Internet scams that you might come across while browsing, we analyse millions of web pages daily for phishing and malware behaviour. Each year, we find hundreds of thousands of phishing and malware hosting pages and add them to our blacklist that we use to warn users of Firefox, Safari and Chrome, via our Safe Browsing API.
Malicious download warnings in Chrome
Google offers protection to users against websites that attempt to distribute malware via drive-by downloads – that is, infections that harm users’ computers when they simply visit a vulnerable site – via our Safe Browsing API. Safe Browsing has done a lot of good for the web, yet the Internet remains rife with deceptive and harmful content. It’s easy to find sites hosting free downloads that promise one thing, but actually behave quite differently. They use social engineering to entice users to download and run the malicious content. Now we have a feature in Google Chrome that aims to protect users against this kind of download, starting with malicious Windows executables. It will display a warning if a user attempts to download a suspected malicious executable file.
Use 2-step verification
It’s good to know that Google offers these security tools to help you to stay safer and more secure online. Read the next theme: Your data on the web and how it makes websites more useful to you
