There is always a risk that you try to log into one of your online accounts and discover that someone else has taken control without your permission. This used to happen frequently in the past to many who used Google's online services, such as Gmail.
This week, Google posted on its blog that it has taken additional measures for better protection of its users' accounts from such activities. The efforts that started in 2010, when Google noticed that hackers had changed the ways they were trying to “break” accounts.
The blog says:
We have seen attackers using stolen passwords to break a million different Google accounts each day, something that repeats for weeks all year. Some even tried sign‑ins to 100 accounts per second.
Google's solution was to create a large number of variables, actually over 120, that are checked each time someone tries to log into a Google account, reports Neowin. If something doesn't match the variables, such as, say, an attempt to access an account from a different country, Google will ask the user to answer a security question or provide their phone number.
