Google with Major Security Goof-Up

Accessing the Google Account through AdWords, AdSense, Analytics is proving rather tricky these days, and not only for the services mentioned above, but for every Google property that requires SSL certification. Nobody wants to see a security warning when they want to see how well their advertising is going, thoughts of phishing start running through mind automatically and panic could be there as well.

All of the above is happening because the King of the Web, Tzar among Tzars Google forgot to renew the certificate for google.com/whatever service, which redirects to www.google.com/whatever service. Apparently they haven’t set up the two sites as separate on their servers, so at the moment one certificate is used for both, instead of the traditional two. Unlucky for the Mountain View based company, with the expiring of one, the other gets bumped because of the redirect, and trends show that users are fed up with typing the www if it’s not necessary.

The certificate for www.google.com is also bound to expire in a couple of months, but with the ruckus surrounding this incident, they’ll probably renew it in due time. No need to worry, though, so far serious security issues have not surfaced, such as cyber criminals taking advantage of this situation and exploiting it to their benefit. As a matter of fact, this type of human error happens all the time, it was only late in January when Yahoo! forgot to renew its SSL certificate for its publisher network. At one time, even the Mighty Microsoft made a similar blundering mistake, when it left the certificate for Hotmail expire, and millions of users weren’t able to check their emails.

Funny fact: do you know how that situation was solved? One user, annoyed by the situation paid the $35 needed for the renewal of the certificate, in Microsoft’s stead. Google should reconsider their strategy and pay GoDaddy the 20 bucks before somebody else does it and creates a possible brand image scandal.

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