For college students, entrepreneurs on a budget or teams working in remote locations around the world, Google’s document creation and storage service, GoogleDocs, has been a boon to productivity. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on software or sharing documents via e-mail, you can simply log in and get the job done quickly and efficiently.
Since using GoogleDocs requires a password, and users can restrict who has access to their documents, most people believe that the site is completely safe. Besides, who is interested in your History 101 paper on the American Revolution or the party planning checklist that you’re sharing with your friends? Granted, some enterprise users may create and store more high-stakes documents on the site, but for the most part GoogleDocs is considered relatively safe.
The security team at Oxford University in England disagrees. Recently, a spate of phishing attacks launched on university students using the GoogleForms application caused the university to make the unprecedented decision to block the site from university-controlled computers. While the block only lasted for a few hours, it was designed to get the attention of both users, who (in the eyes of Oxford IT) weren’t taking security seriously, and Google, who the university believes needs to do more to beef up protection against cyber crime.
Continue reading “Google Docs Aren’t As Secure As You Think”
