I have a gmail address that I set up about six months ago for the sole purpose of experimenting with an online writing tool from a British company, and had not used for months. Last week, I decided to try setting it up on an iPad 1 so I could email newspaper article links to my “real” email.
Within a few hours of doing this, I starting getting messages from accounts.google.com about sign-in attempts “from a less secure device” that were prevented. At first, I thought this might be due to the old iPad hosting what might have been an older version of the newspaper’s “print” edition app. However, after getting about 10 of these over the last few days, I’m wondering how much I should worry about this. Relevant info:
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[*]Attempts to send test email from the gmail app on the iPad worked, but not a single article I tried to send from the newspaper app got through.
[*]The only other place this gmail account exists is in Thunderbird on a Win 8.1 PC, but I set that up after I started seeing getting the gmail messages in the iPad’s existing gmail app.
[*]After using the “Review your devices” link in the emails I received, I changed my password.
[*]All of the “attempts” are coming from IP addresses in either Philadelphia, PA or New Haven, CT.
[*]All the IP addresses start with 50.153 but are different after that, except the first and most recent one, which use the same address.
[*]Out of curiousity, I used a sandboxed browser to try to connect to one of the addresses, but it simply timed out.
My question is: Other than “this sounds bad, right?” are there any specific things going on that this pattern suggests? I can dump this email address, but I don’t want to do that if this simply starts up again with a new address. That is, could these be false positives generated by something I did by suddenly adding the account to the iPad for the newspaper app? (I tried the “true” newspaper iPad app and it sucked; it did not give you the complete newspaper).
