Here’s how to check if your Gmail account has been hacked

With news of more hacks and leaks emerging every day, its pretty safe to say that you’re not necessarily paranoid if you constantly worry about your email being hacked. What with online vigilante hacker groups like the SEA and Anonymous leaking millions of passwords onto the web, and the NSA snooping on the email accounts of even world leaders, the chances that your mail could be hacked are not really that slim. But the good news is that if you have a Gmail account, you can easily check whether or not you have been hacked.

Google has provided users with tools right within the Gmail inbox that can help keep your account secured. Here’s how it works:

To check if your account has been targeted and hacked into without your knowledge, you need to log into your Gmail account using a desktop browser.

Now scroll down to the bottom of your inbox and locate a link called “Details”. When you click on it, a pop-up window will appear, and it will show you a detailed list of the last ten times you – or anyone else –has accessed your account. It will also show you not just when your account was accessed but also how it was viewed. You’ll know if the inbox was opened using an email app, browser, smartphone app and the IP address through which it was accessed.

If you see a suspicious device or IP address, you may want to change your password as soon as possible.

To strengthen the security on your Gmail account, you can even turn the two-factor authentication system on. You can store your IP addresses of the various computers and devices you use to access Gmail, in order to ensure nothing fishy is going on around your account.

While Google has been very particular about ensuring account safety from sleuths, it has been going through a rough couple of weeks with Gmail. An outage late last week caused about 10 percent of Google’s global users to lose access to their Gmail accounts for a good 30 minutes or so. This week, it was also revealed that a bug affecting certain Gmail apps was marking out wrong messages to be deleted or sent into spam folders.