Post by philoYesterday I received a notice that someone other than myself had
gained access to my gmail account.
I changed my stupidly weak password at once and saw zero evidence of
any compromise.
I am wondering something though.
The day before that I had updated three of my spare computers and
while they were updating, I was using my gmail account on them.
Is it possible the alert was sent because of that?
Yes. I get it all the time because of my backup phone, which
periodically connects to my GMail account, even though I've
disabled the polling.
It's an old Samsung Galaxy S2, and because it once was my primary
phone, I had set it up to be able to access my GMail account — which I
only use on my phone anyway.
But those old Android versions were pretty locked down — you cannot
tell them which services not to start at boot. And due to a flaw in
the battery connector, the thing periodically shuts itself off —
the slightest bump will do — and then instantly reboots, starting up all
kinds of junk that I have to manually disable again afterwards in order
not to have it consume any of the limited amount of traffic I have on
that thing — unlike my main phone, which is on a contract, the backup
phone has a prepaid card only.
But so, yes, every time that thing reboots, I get a security alert from
Google that someone was trying to access my GMail account. And the IP
address shows that it was indeed my backup phone.
I'd switch the damn thing to WiFi if I could, but its WiFi antenna
appears to be broken — it's not picking up any of the WiFi networks in
the building anymore, and then it disables itself again. So now I've
simply deleted my email address and my login from that phone.
For that matter, the same thing also happened when I started using this
computer here. On my previous computer, I was using Firefox to log
into my YouTube account, but on this one, I'm using Chromium. Same
thing, a warning, and my IP address hadn't even changed. All that had
changed was that I was now using a different browser.
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With respect,
= Aragorn =