In a blog post, Saikat Mitra, Director – Trust & Safety at Google, said, “During the past couple of weeks across the globe, our advanced machine-learning classifiers have seen 18 million daily malware and phishing attempts related to COVID-19, in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related spam messages.” If you wish to know how can you identify and avoid COVID-19 scams as the Internet is being bombarded with them in the form of phishing emails, it’s important to pause and evaluate any COVID-19 related email before clicking any links or taking other actions. In a blog post, Saikat Mitra, Director – Trust & Safety at Google, said, “Be wary of requests for personal information such as your home address or bank details. Fake links often imitate established websites by adding extra words or letters to them—check the URL’s validity by hovering over it (on desktop) or with a long press (on mobile).” Google has even provided these tips online on Google Safety centre at g.co/covidsecuritytips in Hindi and English, with more Indian languages being added in the coming weeks. A user can also download these tips as handy one-pagers both in Hindi and English languages. Google advises you users to use a password manager to create and store strong passwords. With all the new applications and services you might be using for work and school purposes, it can be tempting to use just one password for all. According to the tech giant, “To keep your private information private, always use unique, hard-to-guess passwords. A password manager, like the one built into Android, Chrome, and your Google Account can help make this easier.” The California-based tech giant has further asked users to protect their Google Account. Therefore, if you use a Google Account, you can easily review any recent security issues and get personalized recommendations to help protect your data and devices with the Security Checkup. Besides this, you can also run a Password Check-up to find out if the password you have saved for third party sites or accounts have been compromised. If that’s the case, quickly change the old password with a new one to be safe. Besides this, you should also consider adding two-factor authentication in order to be able to gain an extra layer of security. Mind you! This helps keep out anyone who shouldn’t have access to your accounts by requiring a secondary factor on top of your username and password to sign in. If you security is at stake online, all you need to do is enroll in Google’s strongest security offering Advanced Protection Program at g.co/advancedprotection. Meanwhile, Google has also built advanced security protections into Google products to automatically identify and stop threats before they ever reach its users. The tech giant’s machine learning models in Gmail already detect and block more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing and malware. For the latest gadget and tech news, and gadget reviews, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. For newest tech & gadget videos subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You can also stay up to date using the Gadget Bridge Android App.
