YouTube, Gmail accounts compromised

ACCOUNTS COMPROMISED: UAE account holders are able to access other people's personal information.

YouTube users in the UAE are currently able to access the account pages and personal information of other people in what appears to be a data storage error, ArabianBusiness.com can reveal.

When signed in on their own accounts, UAE users are able to view the ‘My videos', ‘Contacts', ‘Favourites' and other menus belonging to other users.

UAE users can also see personal profiles and messages, and if account holders have linked their YouTube account to their Gmail account then UAE users can access this as well.

The issue only appears to be present with the Etisalat internet service, while users of the UAE's second internet service provider (ISP) Du, remain unaffected.

The issue has been replicated by the editorial teams of both itp.net and Windows Arabic magazine. As of Wednesday the problem had not been fixed.

In both tests the user accounts that were visible to UAE users were accounts that had been logged into only a few hours previously, suggesting that the index pages have been cached by Etisalat, and were somehow being accessed in error through the cache.

Cache is a temporary storage area where frequently accessed data can be stored for rapid access.

Neither Google, owner of YouTube, nor Etisalat were immediately available for comment.

The issue appears to be very similar to a problem which was reported by users of Kuwaiti ISP FASTtelco, who said that they were able to see other users' Gmail accounts and other personal details, although this was later denied by the ISP.

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READERS' COMMENTS

True
Posted by ismail on Thursday 24 April 2008 at 16:06 UAE time

This is true and I have faced this problem before as well. I am able to see the messages of other users for a long time and am not able to check my messages, this is very irritating and there is no way I can inform u-tube about this..this is pathetic.

Using the 31st stratagem of the ancient China
Posted by Ulrich H. Kiefer, Hohberg, Germany on Thursday 24 April 2008 at 14:23 UAE time


I am not sure if such a possibility really happened. Maybe it could be an old trick that sounds like the 31st stratagem of the ancient China:
in modern times the logic behind was briefly pointed out as the venus trap or Adonis stratagem.

not sure about first to discover...
Posted by Kenneth, Dubai, UAE on Thursday 24 April 2008 at 10:38 UAE time

This started happening on the 03 of April but less frequently than in the subsequent days. Several users had already contacted Youtube about it and then we realised it was Etisalat. It is that silly proxy of theirs causing the issue, not the cache directly. Did anyone also notice that some videos just won't load? The blocking is completely random. They need to pay proper IT people to take care of these issues.

Happens on Du as well
Posted by Paul on Thursday 24 April 2008 at 10:06 UAE time


This happened to me when trying to upload some photos through Google's Picasa - I had someone else's albums to upload to!

And my ISP is Du...

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