Comments on: Google Account Hijacked or Just a Bug?

By: Larry W Jones

Larry W Jones — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:25:25 +0000

I received a note from Google today (March 26, 2010) that they had blocked a collection of “my” photographs on Picasa because they were inappropriate. Since I have no Picasa account or collection and Oklahoma is decidedly not near Singapore, the problem of someone jumping into someone else's account is clearly not confined to Singapore. Actually I have no accounts with Google in the account name used, so I'm outta here. I commend you all to Windows Hotmail live. I'm signing the e-addy Google seems to think I am using.

By: Google security problem: have you had this?

Google security problem: have you had this? — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 08:09:33 +0000

[...] this happened to anyone else? On searching, I see this sort of thing has happened before (and not just with Google Groups), in 2007 there was “isolated bug in our [Google's] interaction with a proxy server in [...]

By: Hasina

Hasina — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:02:48 +0000

Hey cool!

By: madden

madden — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:21:45 +0000

Thank you Derick, much obliged for that info.

By: Derick Ng

Derick Ng — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:45:33 +0000

I have updated this post. According to Priyan, Google has confirmed the fix. Update with your comments if it is not resolved for you.

At least I have not been experiencing any issues with myself logging into others account nor others logging into my account for the past 1 day. Might be not checking “remember me” or just lucky that Google fixed it.

By: madden

madden — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:42:55 +0000

P.S. Beware of phishing emails pretending to offer assistance with this problem. Some of our e-mails have been exposed and anyone could just e-mail you pretending to be Google and offering “assistance” with this problem. The e-mail could look legitimate and even have a google.com domain. They might ask you to reveal your account info over e-mail or direct you to some bogus website. Google would never do that. Have your guard up!

By: madden

madden — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:03:00 +0000

Yup, I use “remember me” too, but lately I’ve stopped using it because of this problem. I’ll keep an eye on this too and see if there’s a pattern. Well, okay so it’s not an IE thing, that’s settled. As for proxy IP, my IP address hardly ever changes when I’m online. I can have the same IP for two days straight and it is very rare for my IP to change when I’m continously online.

By: Hasina

Hasina — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:49:47 +0000

Hey, yeah I used the remember me and sometimes, i don’t sign out at all! And I use firefox too, it’s suppose to be the safest haha

By: madden

madden — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:47:10 +0000

I looked around in Google Support and found a page where I could report this, and so I did. The page is this:

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs

If you are affected and annoyed or worried, etc., and feel like reporting it again, please go ahead. The issue at least merits appearing in Google’s “known issues” page and a great number of people reporting the same issue will get their attention. In the link provided above, at the bottom of the page, it says: If you’ve found a new problem that’s not listed on our Known Issues page, let us know and we’ll investigate. Sounded right, so I did it.

By: Derick Ng

Derick Ng — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:46:36 +0000

@Hasina: I have no idea until some Googler fix this! :p

@madden: I doubt it is browser-related. I’m on Firefox. I am just suspecting a proxy issue because most (if not all) users who experience the issues are on SingNet and SingNet has this proxy round robin thingy which puts you on a different proxy for separate requests. You may want to see http://derickng.com/posts/28-singnet-external-proxy-ip-woes for more information. So the problem with that is that the proxy IP keeps changing and Google might have utilised this as part of the information to which they handle sessions? Just a wild guess.

Do you guys check the “Remember me on this computer” option when signing in? I am monitoring to see if this helps. This is yet another guess that Google sets some key via cookies which they use for the “Remember me on this computer” to the wrong recipient.