Your Gmail Exposed
Image taken from DavidAirey
What would you do if someone hacked into your Gmail account and stole valueble information like your user name and passwords?
This happened to David Airey a logo designer from http://www.davidairey.com which is now forced back to it’s secondary URL http://www.davidairey.co.uk. His site was getting about 2000 hits a day. His business cards need to be updated and clients need to be informed.
The attacker managed to leverage a security exploit in Gmail which allowed him to inject a mail filter into Gmail which forwards all mails with attachments to the attacker. The attacker managed to obtain David’s domain account credentials.
During David’s recent holiday to India with his girlfriend, the attacker transfered “www.davidairey.com” to himself and is now holding it ransom till David decides to pay up the ransom fee of USD250 which initially was USD600.
My Advice: Google has since fixed this issue but still, make sure to check your Gmail filters. It could just save you your business and loads of time.
What would you do if this happened to you? How can we prevent this?
cinod | December 28th, 2007 at 6:48 pm #
Truly.. CSRF(sea surfing) is one on the next sleeping giant in vulnerability research. All major sites have those kind of flaws.
On an update David Airey got his domain back with godaddy’s help.
Friedbeef | December 30th, 2007 at 1:05 am #
Glad he got it back really… everything was messed up like the business cards, PR, links from other sites etc.
Sriram | January 5th, 2008 at 10:19 pm #
And I thought Gmail was the most secure email services out there.any idea what the exploit was?
Danny | January 6th, 2008 at 4:36 am #
Sriram, the exploit basically allowed to attacker to send the victim a link. When accessed from within Gmail the link will add a filter to Gmail which will forward mails with attachments.
ricky | March 24th, 2008 at 1:13 am #
Scary stuff,will think about upgrading to a more secure mail service