Google Security: Google Mac Blog Hacked & Google Calendar Users Not Being Safe

Apr 23, 2007 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Mac Blog was hacked this weekend, at least the second time an official Google blog has been hacked. It was restored fairly quickly. In somewhat related news, Chris Pirillo noticed Google Calendar users storing their private passwords in their public calendars.

I noticed that the Google Mac Blog was hacked when I saw a post in my RSS feed that read;

Yo!

Yo! This is crazy.. I tried to register this and I could! :)

- Vishal

Philipp Lenssen has a screen capture of the hack.

Back in October, the main Google blog was hacked just after Google had posted a notice discussing how seriously the company takes security.

Also in October — a week after the main blog was hacked — an employee mistakenly posted a personal message on the official Blogger blog. Further back in 2006, the entire official Google blog got deleted, which allowed someone else to take control of the domain for a short time.

As for Google Calendar, Chris Pirillo doesn’t blame Google for the security issues in Google Calendar (which are down to users not being smart, rather than some type of “holes” or “hacks”), but he does wish for better user education.

In short, a search on user password in the Google Calendar “public events” area brings up some private passwords that people have left out in public view.


Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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