Last night, there was a pretty significant security breach giving
unauthorized access to your Google Webmaster Tools. Google has fixed
the security issue this morning but not after it being an issue for
probably about 12 hours.
@patrickaltoft
pinged me about this last night on Twitter but I didn't see the issue
myself in Google Webmaster Tools. Plus I didn't see any other complaints
about it in the Google Webmaster forums. But State Of Search blog and David Naylor saw it and documented the issue. We later covered it at Search Engine Land after not hearing back from Google about the issue.
This morning, Google sent us a statement saying:
For
several hours yesterday a small set of Webmaster Tools accounts were
incorrectly re-verified for people who previously had access. We've
reverted these accounts and are investigating ways to prevent this issue
from recurring.
It is unclear if any damage was
done over that 12 hour period but for some, it was incredibly nerve
racking knowing that some people may have unauthorized access to your
Webmaster Tools account and do some serious damage to your site in
Google.
Here is a screen shot from David Naylor showing the unauthorized access:
This morning I spotted only a couple threads with complaints about the issue.
Did any damage happen to your site's due to this?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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