If I had dollar every time someone came to me worried about their wife or husband, kids Gmail email account being hacked I’d be a… If someone hacks your gmail you can detect it and even narrow who could have done it based on geographic location. Google published an article on how to monitor suspicious account activity. According to google “a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert.”
While this is helpful when your gmail is hacked by someone in China it won’t tell you if you neighbor logged in.
But you can indeed identify suspicious activity on your own without depending on a notice from google in your gmail account.
When you log in to gmail look to the bottom of the page and you’ll see an area that list the location of the the last account activity as well as a detailed link which will list the last five logins, there time and IP information.
So now what?
First figure out your IP address
Now any discrepancies in the details provided by Google in comparison to your IP address you know it’s not you!
So now just run a IP LOOKUP to determine who those other IP Addresses belongs to. Using the location information and at time the provider can really help you narrow down the location so you’ll have an idea of who hacked your gmail account.
Always keep your passwords longer than 15 characters and any inclusion of letters, numbers and special characters is always helpful. If you suspect someone has got your email password change the password ASAP. Chances are you’ll never find out for sure.
Never knew that function existed in gmail, but if you’re in light mode it’s no longer viewable, plus hackers can disable that option I’ve heard. Another thing I suggest is correlating and running ip checks on other sites, such as http://ip-address-lookup-v4.com/ which is helpful in case ip-lookup.net didn’t update their RIPE database.