Internet giant Google has said that a software vulnerability has exposed documents that were previously thought to be securely held in its online Docs application.
While the problem has been fixed and only 0.05% of the digital documents in the application were exposed, the company says it is working to make sure future attacks are unsuccessful.
“We’ve identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users shared some of their documents inadvertently,” Google Docs product manager Jennifer Mazzon wrote on Google’s website.
“We’re sorry for the trouble this has caused. We understand our users’ concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we’re treating this very seriously.”
The problem has been prominent where multiple users can access a single document. “As part of the fix, we used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as having been affected,” Mazzon said.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
