Google Stored G Suite Users’ Passwords in Plain-Text for 14 Years

May 22, 2019

After Facebook and Twitter, Google becomes the latest
technology giant to have accidentally stored its users’ passwords
unprotected in plaintext on its servers—meaning any Google employee
who has access to the servers could have read them.

In a blog
post ^[1] published Tuesday,
Google revealed that its G Suite platform mistakenly stored
unhashed passwords of some of its enterprise users on internal
servers in plaintext for 14 years because of a bug in the password
recovery feature.

G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps, is a collection of cloud
computing, productivity, and collaboration tools that have been
designed for corporate users with email hosting for their
businesses.

It’s basically a business version of everything Google
offers.

The flaw, which has now been patched, resided in the password
recovery mechanism for G Suite customers that allows enterprise
administrators to upload or manually set passwords for any user of
their domain without actually knowing their previous passwords in
order to help businesses with on-boarding employees and for account
recovery.

If the admins did reset, the admin console would store a copy of
those passwords in plain text instead of encrypting them, Google
revealed.

“We made an error when implementing this functionality back in
2005: The admin console stored a copy of the unhashed password,”
Google says.

However, Google also says that the plain text passwords were stored
not on the open Internet but on its own secure encrypted servers
and that the company found no evidence of anyone’s password being
improperly accessed.

“This practice did not live up to our standards. To be clear, these
passwords remained in our secure encrypted infrastructure,” Google
says. “This issue has been fixed, and we have seen no evidence of
improper access to or misuse of the affected passwords.”

Google also clarifies that the bug was restricted to users of its G
Suite apps for businesses and that no free version of Google
accounts like Gmail were affected.

Though the company did not disclose how many users might have
been affected by this bug beyond just saying the issue affected “a
subset of our enterprise G Suite customers,” with more than 5
million G Suite enterprise customers, the bug could affect a large
number of users — presumably any user who used G Suite in last 14
years.

In order to address the issue, Google has since removed the
capability from G Suite administrators and emailed them a list of
impacted users, asking them to ensure that those users reset their
passwords.

Google says the company would be automatically resetting
passwords for those users who do not change their passwords.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we’ll reset accounts that have not
done so themselves,” the tech giant says.

Google is the latest tech company to accidentally store unhashed
passwords on its internal servers. Recently, Facebook was in the
news for storing plaintext passwords for
hundreds of millions of its users, both Instagram and
Facebook, on its internal servers.

Almost a year ago, Twitter also reported a similar security bug
that unintentionally exposed passwords
for its 330 million users ^[4]
in readable text on its internal computer system.

^[2]^[3]

References

^{^}
blog post
(cloud.google.com)
^{^}
passwords for hundreds of millions
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Instagram
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
exposed passwords for its 330 million
users (thehackernews.com)

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Google Stored G Suite Users’ Passwords in Plain-Text for 14 Years

References

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