I feel almost embarrassed writing this column, but I figured if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. Google is running this cute promotion this week where you can tack on another 2 GB of storage to your account. The only thing you have to do is run through a series of security settings on your account. It will take about two minutes at the most. You go to this page for the detail to read more and then navigate over to your account. Go ahead, I will wait until you come back.

Nice, hunh? Well, not so nice for moi. I found out that someone was using a Windows computer last week in Kentucky and signed in as me. I quickly changed my password, and then forced everyone else to logout of my account. Borderline creepy, right? What happened? I have no idea. I guess that is one of the reasons why the promotion is so useful to them: they can tighten up everyone’s credentials quickly, and the extra storage costs them close to nothing.

Part of the security assessment is to see what connected apps are signing into your account. It is always a good idea to bring up the corresponding screens in other Web services to make sure that you know what is happening. I call this an “app audit” and I mention how to do it for LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook (but curiously, forgot about Google) in this post from several years ago. That will take you another few minutes.

Please, for your own protection, run through these checks now.