Google Apps Security Problems Fixed
March 9, 2009 by Jimson Lee · Leave a Comment
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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About Jimson Lee
Jimson is a freelance industry analyst, with over 25 years experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining CRMHelpDeskSoftware, he spent 4 years as a Senior Consultant at Sierra Systems Group, part of Golden Gate Capital, a leading private equity firm with $9 billion in capital under management. Jimson currently resides in Rome, Italy.
