Google revealed a shocking statement that they stored enterprise G Suite customers login password in plain text over a decade.
According to Google’s privacy and security policy, all the customers and users login credentials must be stored in an encrypted format to ensure maximum security.
The encrypted format means to store your passwords with cryptographic hashes, which is a one-way process, and it can’t be reversed.
Every time Users log in the application, Google authentication with the stored password hash that lies in a bit of cryptography.
So instead of remembering the exact characters of the password, Google scrambles it with a “hash function,” so it becomes something like “7gjfsgmhk222354kgsg”.
Every time Google authentication the customer password with the same way along with the username and both are then also encrypted before being saved to disk.
Google G suite Enterprise Accounts Passwords in Unencrypted Format
Google provided a Tool for G Suite customer’s domain administrators to set and recover passwords, which allows company administrators to upload or manually set user passwords for their company’s users.
This future helped to G suite admins with onboarding new users in their organization and used to recover their password when required.
Google explains that they made an error in this functionality during the development phase; in results, admin console stored a copy of the unhashed password.
According to Google’s Suzanne Frey, VP, Engineering, Cloud Trust, we discovered that starting in January 2019 we had inadvertently stored a subset of unhashed passwords in our secure encrypted infrastructure. These passwords were stored for a maximum of 14 days. This issue has been fixed and, again.
Google claims that there is no evidence of improper access to or misuse of the affected passwords.
Google also notified G Suite administrators to change those impacted passwords, also provide G Suite administrators with numerous 2-step verification (2SV) options, including Security Keys, which Google relies upon for its own employee accounts.
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