New G Suite Alerts Provide Visibility Into Suspicious User Activity
9.8.18 securityweek Security

After bringing alerts on state-sponsored attacks to G Suite last week, Google is now also providing administrators with increased visibility into user behavior to help identify suspicious activity.

Courtesy of newly introduced reports, G Suite administrators can keep an eye on account actions that seem suspicious and can also choose to receive alerts when critical actions are performed.

Admins can set alerts for password changes, and can also receive warnings when users enable or disable two-step verification or when they change account recovery information such as phone number, security questions, and recovery email.

By providing admins with visibility into these actions, Google aims at making it easier to identify suspicious account behavior and detect when user accounts may have been compromised.

Should an admin notice that a user has changed both the password and the password recovery info, which could be a sign that the account has been hijacked, they can leverage the reports to track time and IP address and determine if the change indeed seems suspicious.

Based on the findings, the G Suite administrator could then take the appropriate action to mitigate the issue and restore the user account, such as password reset and disable 2-step verification.

Admins can also use the new reports to gain visibility into an organization's security initiatives, such as the monitoring of domain-wide initiative to increase the adoption of two-step verification.

Access to these reports is available in Admin console > Reports > Audit > Users Accounts.

The new capabilities are set to gradually roll out to all G Suite editions and should become available to all customers within the next two weeks.

“G Suite admins have an important role in protecting their users’ accounts and ensuring their organization’s security. To succeed, they need visibility into user account actions. That’s why we’re adding reports in the G Suite Admin console that surface more information on user account activity,” Google notes.