Jan 24
SECURING YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT
ENABLING 2-STEP VERIFICATION ‘2FA’
You have probably heard of the term ‘2FA’. If not, 2FA stands for Two Factor Authentication which is part of the multi-factor authentication mechanism that one can implement to secure how they access their accounts, services, platforms or even physical locations.
Social media and email platforms are dominant in our daily lives. It therefore paramount that we ensure they are well protected from unauthorized access. You might have experienced/heard of someone’s account, lets say Facebook or Instagram being hacked and them loosing control and access to it. This can be quite annoying and even harmful if whoever took control over your account had any malicious intent.
Today we shall be implementing 2FA on your Google Account to better protect yourself from adversaries that may be targeting you.
The first step is ensuring you have a strong password (12 or more characters with at least one capital & small letter[A…Z, a…b], a digit [0…9] and a special character. [!,@,#]). You can use the table below to guide you on how strong your password is.
NB:
The time duration may vary depending on processing speed of the machine used to hack the password. With advent of quantum computing, these time duration may eventually reduce by large margins.
1. Select manage your Google Account option after logging into your account.
2. Select the Security Option tab
3. Scroll down to the signing in to Google section and click the 2-step verification.
4. Now you are ready to set up your 2FA for your account.
5. You will need to sign into your account again.
6. You should now be able to see devices that can be used for the 2-step verification.
7. If you can’t see your mobile device listed, ensure you have logged onto the account you are setting up the 2-step verification on your phone.
8. Next step is setting up a backup method.
9. You will receive a verification code on your mobile device.
10. Finally enable this feature by clicking on the turn on option.
11. Now every time you login, you will be presented with the following verification step. You will required to verify on your mobile device.
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