It seems as if hacking has become quite the trend this season. After retail stores and Apple Inc., it’s the mighty Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) that was afflicted with a hack that cost them over 5 million Gmail accounts. Hacked accounts weren’t just connected to Gmail but other Google services as well.
The hack mostly affected Russian users. The catch is that 60 percent of these hacked accounts are active on one or more Google services. Google claims that it is in the process of officially investigating the matter alongside relevant authorities to track down the hackers.
Last month Apple suffered a hack too, although the scale was not as large as Google’s. The hack was into the iCloud accounts of some well known celebrities. The controversial leak made the headlines and after almost 3 weeks Apple is still fighting its backlash. Apple came out with a face saving statement, in which they emphasized on the complexity of the username and passwords and also urged the users to use the two step verification module.
Google’s approach has been no different. They claim that the breach didn’t happen in their data base but through online malware and small hacking sites. Google boasted about its security being unbreakable; however the users at the moment are not too convinced by these statements and claims.
5 million is not a small number and if the leak wasn’t from Google’s data base, only a handful accounts should have been hacked. Google so far has not been able to come up with any satisfactory statements about the hack and it has taken the standard approach of face saving with meaningless statements. Google users, from users to tech bloggers, are criticizing Google’s laid back attitude.
Google should have taken necessary steps when they came to know about the hack; the most alarming thing is that they did not even know about the hack right away. When things came out in the open the company came out with a rather pathetic statement urging people to change their passwords and saying that only 2 percent of the accounts were genuine.
Incidents such as these make one extremely skeptical of internet security. On top of all the controversy the laid back approach of these big corporations worsens the situation. Also, it’s a clear indication that hackers have gained enormous expertise in their field and are proving to be difficult to handle.
The question is if the security of Apple and Google can be compromised, what about the social networking websites?
So far the only solution to these issues seems to depend on the user; they should not put anything too confidential or private on the internet, but then this is not the answer; Google and Apple claim to look after their customers but their statements are creating a lack of trust in them.
Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) stock opened up today at a value of $590.00 and almost after four hours into the morning session the stock dipped by 0.60% ($589.46). Stock’s total market cap is 397.19B whereas its inst. Ownership is 79%.