Seeing if your business Outlook email has an intruder -

Seeing if your business Outlook email has an intruder -

 Your Outlook.com account has a Recent Activity page that displays your account activity, including your sign in information. The page lists the date, time and geographic location of each sign in and sign in attempt. Additionally, it also shows specific data -- such as the IP address and the operating system of the device that is being used to sign in to your account -- that can help you to decipher whether or not someone else is accessing your business emails without your permission.

Check Your Account Activity

The Recent Activity page is accessible through Outlook.com's account Settings menu. After you sign into your Outlook.com email dashboard, click your name in the upper right corner of the Web page, and then select "Account Settings." Enter your account password when prompted, and then select "Recent Activity." Scroll down the page to view the list of activities. Click the "View More Account Activity" text link to view more activity entries. Click on a suspicious entry -- such as a successful sign in from a location you are unfamiliar with -- to view more information about the entry. If the information does not match your activity -- for example, the device that is accessing your account is not a device that you use -- someone else may be logging in to your account.

Do you know who is reading your Gmail? Do you know how to stop those who shouldn’t have access to such messages?

A report published this week in the "Wall Street Journal" found that while Google itself indicated more than a year ago that it would stop reading your mail to target ads, hundreds of third-party software developers might be doing just that for marketing purposes. And in some cases, the Journal found, people, and not just computers, could be reading your Gmail.

According to the piece, software developers scan hundreds of millions of emails of users who sign up for email-based services, with Google doing little to police the practice.

There are basic steps you can take to help prevent such access.

Start by clicking on your account information in the upper right hand corner of the Gmail screen. As an alternative, type account.google.com in your browser.

Next, click Sign-in & Security and scroll down to the “Apps with account access” section.  This is where you can keep track of which apps or services you gave permission to access your account, and remove the ones you no longer use or trust.

To do that, click the “Manage Apps” link. Google has segregated apps into three main sections: Google’s own apps; the apps and sites you use to sign into Google; and the third-party apps with account access.

Google’s own apps include listings for the likes of Chromecast, Google Chrome or, as I discovered, an otherwise unnamed “Google Assistant Enabled Device.” 

If you click on any of these items, you’ll see when access was given, what kind of access it has, and a “Remove Access” button

It’s a good idea to periodically go through these steps.

Prevent future hacking

 You can revoke a hacker's access to future data by doing the following:

• The obvious - Run an antivirus checkand reinstall your operating system if necessary.
• Clear your browser's cache and cookies.
• Change all of your account passwords.