Phishing is one of the more common ways of attack that hackers choose to do via email. This is why it is important to check who the sender of the email is, and if you don’t know who they are, it’s probably a bad idea to download any of its attachments. So far Google has been doing a stellar job at protecting its users, but there’s always room for improvement.
In a post on Google’s blog, the company revealed new security measures that they have implemented to make sure that Gmail is safe for its users. One of those methods is by showing users who are authenticated and users who aren’t. Those who aren’t will have a question mark in place of their profile photo, meaning that this is someone whose profile is unauthenticated.
Google will also introduce warning messages when emails come with embedded links. If the links are deemed to be dangerous and are leading to phishing or malware-ladden websites, Google will display a warning message to tell users not to proceed and will prevent the page from loading completely.
However Google does note that not all flagged emails are potentially dangerous. We’re sure on more than one occasion you might have emails sent from friends, family members, work, or your bank that have accidentally ended up in your spam folder, but either way just to be safe, just double check it all the same.