"Using the IP address you provide to us, our automated system can determine your broad geographic location," explained Google product manager Yariv Adan in a blog post. "If you log in using a remote IP address, our system will flag it for you. So if you normally log into your account from your home in California and then a few hours later your account is logged in from France, you’ll get a notice like the one above at the top of your Dashboard page -- alerting you to the change and providing links for more details."
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Google has set up its Dashboard notifications to provide a 'more details' pop-up window that provides an opportunity to change a possibly compromised password on the spot.
The notification is similar to a warning message added to Gmail back in March, which itself represented an expansion on IP log information presented to Gmail users in 2008 for similar purposes.
The reason to provide such information is to make the user aware of possible unauthorized logins and to mitigate the risk that an attacker might breach a given account and might configure it to forward copies of messages to the attacker without the account owner's knowledge.
For Google, which has been encouraging businesses to ditch on-premises computing in favor of its cloud-based services, allaying security concerns about its offerings remains an ongoing chore.
The breach disclosed by the company in January hasn't made that job any easier. In January, Google revealed that some of its intellectual property had been stolen as a result of a sophisticated cyber attack traced to China and said that one of the primary goals of the attack appeared to be to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
A Google spokesperson was not able to immediately provide figures indicating the number of suspicious logins flagged by the company's system.