Earlier today we blogged about the ‘faked google docs shared with you‘ scam which was spreading like wildfire. Thousands or perhaps millions of people got the emails, us included. The scam email would allow an attacker to view your gmail account and have access to all of your contacts list.
The link was a carefully crafted link which exploited a bug in Google’s API and the Google Docs system.
We now have an official response from Google via tweets from their official Google Docs twitter account:
(1 of 3) Official Google Statement on Phishing Email: We have taken action to protect users against an email impersonating Google Docs…
— Google Docs (@googledocs) May 3, 2017
(2 of 3) & have disabled offending accounts. We’ve removed the fake pages, pushed updates through Safe Browsing, and our abuse team…
— Google Docs (@googledocs) May 3, 2017
(3 of 3) is working to prevent this kind of spoofing from happening again. We encourage users to report phishing emails in Gmail.
— Google Docs (@googledocs) May 3, 2017
And after these initial 3 tweets, they released info for those would might have clicked on the link:
We've addressed the issue with a phishing email claiming to be Google Docs. If you think you were affected, visit https://t.co/O68nQjFhBL. pic.twitter.com/AtlX6oNZaf
— Google Docs (@googledocs) May 3, 2017
We had confidence that the Google team would get to this quickly – and we hope that the malicious actors are tracked down. That said, we do expect some more of this type of attack until Google is able to block the entire attack vector.