Google Drive is one of the best online cloud storage services which is highly used these days. Google itself is much popular all over the world because of its powerful search engine and other services. Google drive is undoubtedly making a huge sense to those who need to rely on a versatile cloud storage service like it.
Google Drive comes with a lot of advantages that could make you feel great while using gdrive. Especially it allows collaborative works where a team can perform on a project accordingly. They can even communicate with each other and preview the edit history to know what has been changed when they aren’t there.
Despite this, google drive has some disadvantages also. Among them, having a lack in its security system is the most important one. Being the world’s most popular name, google should fix these issues and make its cloud storage function more reliable to the users and hopefully, they will get it soon.
However, in this discussion, we are putting this in our shoes and finding the possible solution of protecting your gdrive files from unwanted hacking situations. If you are a google drive user and you are concerned about this issue, you should read it carefully.
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How secure is google drive?
Since we are here to learn the ways of protecting google drive files from unwanted hacking, it is worth discussing how secure gdrive is. Is google drive secure?
There is a lot of use of google drive to store personal files and documents to make them accessible from anywhere. But before making a safe deposit of your files in google drive, you should know that google drive can be hacked by hackers.
Hackers always seek lucrative information which they can use for their own benefit. Besides, hackers can manipulate viruses in the server of google drive through which they can easily spoil users’ data and resources.
Therefore, we should be concerned about this security issue of google drive. Another thing that you should care about is sharing google drive files with someone else’s. Google Drive doesn’t have a notification system to notify owners when someone accesses the drive through the shared link.
If the shared link has been distributed to third persons, then there are chances to get leaked and hampered your resources by them.
Tips to secure your google drive files
If you are a hard google drive user and you still don’t intend to secure your drive files, then you are at risk. To get you out of the risk, there are some tips you can follow. We are discussing the same here below,
Disable unrecognizable third party applications
Once you have a google account, you have logged in to various platforms through that. At present, a google account is an essential thing that you need in every step of your online journey. Whether you want to subscribe to any website’s newsletter or you want to sign up to get access to any particular website’s platforms, you just need a google account.
Although, there are other ways like signing in through social media accounts, Apple or Microsoft accounts, and so on. However, using your google account on so many different platforms and third party applications can be a potential threat to your google drive.
It is because some unauthorized third party integrations always persuade users to access their personal information. Therefore, you have to keep an eye on those third party integrations you have logged in before and check if any of them you can’t recognize.
To check this, you can follow these options,
- log in to google drive
- In the top right corner of the window, click on your profile picture and choose “account”
- Scroll down to ‘connected apps and services
- Click on ‘view all’ next to ‘account permissions’
- Disable unrecognizable apps
Sharing can be harmful
Google Drive makes it super easy to share drive files with anyone you want. With google drive log in, you can share any files with an additional link provided by the system. For each particular, it makes a particular link through which you can give access to anyone in that drive file.
But sharing can cause you to get unwanted entries in that drive file. It is a bit lacking on Google that they don’t add any notification system for the time when anyone accesses your drive file through the link.
When sharing your drive file link, you should be aware that the link shouldn’t go to the third person. If so, anyone who gets the link can access your drive and you don’t even notice that. This is very bad because, in this way, hackers can easily access your drive and can do whatever they want. They can remove files or put virus files which could be dangerous when you click on them.
However, you can control the activity of people of what they can perform after accessing the drive file. For example, you can set the access level by the owner, can comment, and edit.
Therefore, you have to be concerned about the shared link of your driver file. You should check constantly of shared files systems if any unwanted person accesses whom you don’t want to see there. Interestingly, Google recently removed the search query option that helped users to find all the files that they have shared before.
2 step verification
2 step verification cannot completely make it safe for you but it can make the job harder for the hackers. In the world of modern technology, anything can be hacked and sometimes we see that the biggest tech giant’s server also gets hacked by professional black hat hackers.
Google Drive has a 2 step verification feature and in common sense, everyone should apply it to their google account. 2 step verification is something like a wall before hackers. But be aware that, you have to disable the voicemail option as hackers have an easy chance to break the voice lock of your google account.
Since hackers must have your google account before accessing your google drive, applying 2 step verification will keep you in a little safe position. If you don’t know how to enable 2 step verification for your google account, you can ask google.
Or you can follow these steps, log into your google drive > click on the profile > manage your account > in the left options panel, click security > signing in, then you can see 2 step verification option.
Use google authenticator app
Google authenticator app is another great solution to secure your google account from any unwanted access. It is a mobile app that will take your privacy to a new level. Using this app, you will receive a code that will change over time.
So, every time you will log in to your Google account, no matter what device you are using, you will receive a code. To use it you have to install the google authenticator app on your mobile. Finally, by following these options you can make your google account safer and harder to beat your password for those who have hacking purposes. To get the best result, you should try both 2 step verification and the google authenticator app along.