Your Google Docs is in danger. What to do

Last night, there was another flash mob on the Internet to search for Google documents. Internal information of companies, personal payment data, lists of logins and passwords, presentations of upcoming events - this is just a small part of what could be found in a matter of minutes. The error was corrected several hours later, but managed to lead to irreversible consequences.

The scale of the problem

For ordinary users, the situation is primarily the most dangerous from the point of view of the loss of confidential and payment data. The ability to search for "Google Docs" with access via a link was open for only a few hours, but in such a short period people managed to lose money from their online wallets, logins and passwords from social networks. For large companies and government departments, this turned out not only to the loss of corporate data, but also to scandals that may appear after the documents were made public. Naturally, storing such documents in online services is always a risk. This time it turned out to be unjustified.

How was the search for documents

Yandex began to index Google Docs, any user could write a keyword in the search and use it to find documents in the service from Google. To do this, it was enough to click on the search settings button and enter “docs.google.com” in the “On site” field, after which a list of all documents for this keyword would open.

How to secure your data

If you use Google Docs to store corporate or personal data, you urgently need to check what access rights are set for your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The link will open a list of documents, you will need to open each of them separately and click on the blue button "Access Settings" in the upper right corner.

Then, in the window that appears, you will see the options for accessing this document. If only you have access, the window will look like this:

If not only you have access to your document, the parameters window will look like this:

In order to secure your data, you need to select the "OFF. - access by invitation only”in the document access parameters. For more detailed privacy settings, you can use the "Advanced" button.

A few hours after the announcement, the document search capabilities of Yandex and Google have fixed the problem. Now Google Docs search does not work in Yandex. However, the situation has already occurred, as a result of which details about the activities of various companies, personal data of people emerge on the Internet. For example, many cryptocurrency wallet holders have lost their anonymity. Unfortunately, this is only a small part of what can be published later by those who have found any confidential information.

We remind you that for security reasons, you should never store important information in data sources, access to which you do not control personally. Due to the mistakes of companies that promise you reliability and confidentiality, both ordinary users and large firms suffer. Do not forget to close the link to your "Google Docs" to protect yourself from similar situations in the future.

The life hacker is already preparing material on information security on the network, which will tell you about what services you can use in order not to get into a similar situation.