By Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek
Addressing one of the ongoing concerns about cloud computing services, Google on Wednesday introduced a new security feature for its Gmail users that provides notification of unusual account activity.
Since July 2008, Gmail has included a "Last account activity" link below users' inboxes that provides information about when the account was last accessed and the IP address used. But the placement of the link makes it useful mainly to people seeking to confirm an existing suspicion.
The new notification will take the form of "a very big warning," said Google product manager Will Cathcart in a phone interview.
Such a warning no doubt would have been useful to identify the attempts to access the accounts of Gmail-using human rights advocates late last year, part of the "Operation Aurora" attacks on Google's infrastructure that led it to shut down its search engine in mainland China.
"The idea behind the feature is that we already give users an idea about the activity on their account, but we wanted to provide more information," Cathcart said. "We look the login history for an account, specific to each user, and look for changes in that history based on a number of different algorithms."
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