Google is amping up protection with an advanced program. It’s calling it the Advanced Protection Program, naturally, and it’s aimed, Google says, at a much “smaller set of users,” specifically anyone that could be considered an average user. Google’s goal here is to provide the absolute strongest protection to these users at all time, and includes three core parts including the strongest defenses against phishing, preventative measures against sharing sensitive data accidentally, and making sure fraudulent account access is blocked so that users who own the accounts are the only ones who are able to access their accounts.
On the face of things, Google’s new Advanced Protection Program means that users who are at “an elevated risk of attack” will have the best protection they can against the most dangerous account threats, Google also notes that this means users will need to forfeit a little bit of convenience that is normally offered to the majority of users for this heightened level of security against potential risks. So there is a trade off that users should be aware of. Account security is consistently and constantly updated to help with the protection, which might mean that users are going to have a few more steps when logging in to ensure that they’re data is protected to a level that Google wants to offer with this program.
Though there are more parts to the new system of protection than just Google’s three core parts, these are the most basic levels to the system. To protect against phishing as best as possible, those enrolled in the Advanced Protection Program (yes, users will have the option to enroll, meaning they have control over being part of the program or not) will need to use Security Keys, such as USB or wireless keys when logging in. To help protect against accidental sharing of sensitive data, sharing documents or other types of files will be limited to just Google accounts. More specifically Google is limiting full access to your Gmail and Google Drive accounts. While this will only include Google apps for the time being Google does anticipate more apps being allowed full access at some point. The last core part, blocking fraudulent account access, users will need to go through more than the usual steps to recover an account if they should happen to forget their password. The Advanced Protection Program will be available to consumer Google accounts only for the time being, and users will have to use Chrome as their default browser due to the requirement of standard U2F support.