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"Going Google" Exposes Students' Email
A ReadWriteWeb piece up on the NY Times site explores the recent glitch during the move of a number of colleges onto Google's email service that allowed a number of students to see each others' inboxes for a period of more than three days. Google would not give exact numbers, but the article concludes that about 10 schools were affected. "While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern — at least at Brown — was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative. In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. ... The students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days... before the accounts were suspended by Google. Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response.' (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that 'prompt.')"
While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days
Pardon my ignorance, the glitch was minor?
What?
The fact that emails contain back-mailed passwords to many kinds of online services, including those involving payments (which is stupid practice, but the online service providers do it anyway, they send you the password when you sign up)...
The fact that I can reset your password to any third-party online service account where I know that you use it and that you associated it with this email account...
Still minor glitch? Reading others emails? Really? I or TFA must be missing something.
Well, I'm the guy at Brown who actually does the part of the migration that switches over internal email to Google (though others are involved), and I can tell you that we knew about a few almost immediately, from student reports. Google was involved as soon as we found out, but it took them a little while to determine exactly what happened.
Also, this wasn't as bad as it sounds. Students weren't receiving new mail meant for someone else, the problem was with the tool that migrated their old existing email from our Exchange system to their new Google email boxes. The 22 students got the contents of other students' -old- mail boxes, not new mail.
It appears that Google upgraded their IMAP migration tool on the back-end, and there was a problem with the new version. Interesting thing about 'the cloud', all the tools available on it are upgraded without the end user being aware. Had there been a 'migrate user email boxes - updated today to version 1.1!' button instead of 'migrate user email boxes', I might have waited a few days to let Google shake-out the bugs.