SECURITY ISSUE: Google Web Accelerator can let others see your logged-in pages
The web is abuzz with talk of the pros and cons of the new Google Web Accelerator.
Mostly the con, and the issue is privacy.
I want to let you in on an immediate problem you must understand.
This morning, the Inside Google blog published in its excellent article, Much Controversy of Web Accelerator, a very worrisome bug that is a byproduct of GWA–getting logged into some web sites as someone else! Or put in a more frightening way, others can see pages of YOURS as if they were logged in as you.
An excerpt:
“See, Google isn’t serving web pages faster, its serving other people’s versions of the web page faster. What does that mean? Try using Web Accelerator on a forum site, one with lots of geeks who love Google and probably already have Web Accelerator installed. Why, if you’re lucky, you’ll be logged in as someone else, as the folks at SomethingAwful.com discovered. The posters in that forum discovered that most of the times they refreshed the page, they were logged in as a different person, seeing their friend’s control panel for the forums.
They were even kind enough to provide screenshots.”
Read it. Then bookmark this article with this permalink and send it to your friends who might be using GWA. Quickly. I’ve just turned mine off.
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Google Accelerator: The Wrath of the Plex
Uh oh! Serious issues are starting to appear with the Google Accelerator, including security/authentication issues.
More here and here
[...] search If you thought the new Google Webaccelerator was a cool idea (I did), be very careful…. No Comments &ra [...]
GRR!! Google Web Accelerator:
Yes 2 yrs, later, still problems.
Was going grand, speeding up my slow pc on the net, while my sis notice that it stop her from sending emails in gmail, hotmail, and yahoo. So i uninstalled it straight away, and gmail, hotmail, and yahoo are back to normal. Thank god.