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Google extended an apology to its G Suite customers after revealing that it stored passwords of some enterprise users in plain text for nearly 14 years.
Storing passwords without cryptographic hashes expose them to hacking risk as they become readable.
The issue has been around since 2005 and Google, in a statement, said it is working with enterprise administrators to ensure that the users reset their passwords.
Frey added that the company neither lived up to its own standards nor those of its customers. "We apologise to our users and will do better," she added.
If you have a Google account, Google's core sign-in system is designed not to know your password.
"Both are then also encrypted before being saved to disk. The next time you try to sign in, we again scramble your password the same way. If it matches the stored string then you must have typed the correct password, so your sign-in can proceed," explained Frey.
In its enterprise product G Suite, Google found that some passwords were stored unhashed in plain text.
"To be clear, these passwords remained in our secure encrypted infrastructure. This issue has been fixed and we have seen no evidence of improper access to or misuse of the affected passwords," Google claimed.
Google said it has notified G Suite administrators to change the impacted passwords. Twitter recently advised all its 330 million users to change passwords owing to a breach.
Facebook in March revealed it fixed a security issue wherein millions of its users' passwords were stored in plain text and "readable" format for years and according to reports, were searchable by thousands of its employees.
After admitting it "unintentionally" uploaded emails of nearly 1.5 million of new users, Facebook later revealed that millions of Instagram passwords were also stored on its servers in a readable format.
— with inputs from IANS
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