Google Apps Security Problems Fixed

March 9, 2009 by Jimson Lee

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Last month, I noticed something unusual.

I use Google Apps for hosted email as well as Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

After sending out a few emails to various vendors, I noticed my Documents’ Share permissions under “Collaborators” included those vendors emails! YIKES! Luckily, my Spreadsheets were not compromised, which included much more sensitive financial data.

This is a serious issue which is now resolved. It’s like giving your laptop or PC local administrative rights to the Domain Users group!

Security, uptime, and long term availability are the 3 biggest concerns for anyone entering the cloud.

And Google Docs product manager Jennifer Mazzon wrote on the blog that less than 0.05% of all the documents in Google Docs’ custody were impacted.

This explanation was on their Blog:

Yesterday we contacted some of our users to let them know about an issue that affected their Google Docs accounts. We believe the issue affected less than 0.05% of all documents, but, in the interest of transparency, we wanted to share the details more broadly.

As we noted in the Google Docs Help Forum yesterday, we’ve identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users shared some of their documents inadvertently. The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue affected so few users because it only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place.

For this small percentage of documents, the bug (now fixed) occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions. The bug did not affect spreadsheets.

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