Ik gebruik de Office applicaties van Microsoft al jaren. En ik mag er graag en met regelmaat op vloeken. Maar er zijn momenten dat ik me gelukkig prijs.

Eén van die momenten was een paar dagen geleden toen ik een blog entry van zephoria las, waarin zij de thriller van een kennis beschreef. Die kennis gebruikt(e) ongeveer alle Google diensten; als een gevolg was veel van zijn data online.

Lees en huiver:

Bob was an early adopter of all things Google. His account was linked to all sorts of Google services. Gmail was the most important thing to him – he’d been using it for four years and all of his email (a.k.a. “his life”) was there. Bob also managed a large community in Orkut, used Google’s calendaring service, and had accounts on many of of their different properties.

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

::gasp:: My heart threatens to attack my throat at the mere idea of losing four years worth of email. ::shudder:: Or what if this blog disappeared? Like, OMG. {insert horror film music here}

Luckily, Bob is well-connected. His friends in high places forwarded his story to powerful people inside Google. Today, his account was restored. While such a restoration should provide a sigh of relief, it’s also a bit disconcerting. What if Bob hadn’t been so well connected? What other kinds of damage can phishers do to people who have so many of their key tools linked together under a common account?