Google+ security breach, more than 50 million users' data leaked

New Delhi : While the tech giant, Google has announced to shut down its Google+ social media service, a recent development claims that it has suffered from major data leak. Owing to the security breach, the site has exposed data of as many as 52.5 million users. As of now, Google+ will shut down sooner than it was supposed to.

Google said the leak was triggered by a bug in one of its Application Program Interface (APIs), but has now been patched. A recent software update for their systems also introduced a bug into Google+ APIs. The vulnerability was detected during the company's internal testing in November and was found to be providing access to private profile information of users to apps and their developers.

The company now claims that within a week of detection, the issue has been fixed.

Google, in a blog post, mentions that the API bug exposed information that had been kept private on the affected profiles. This included data like name, email address, occupation, age, and content shared by other Google+ users, but not passwords.

The technology company is now investigating the matter but has confirmed that no evidence shows developers misused or were even aware of the information they had access to.

Way back in October, Google revealed a similar bug and confirmed that Google+ will shut down for good in August 2019. But now, after the second case of data leak, it will expedite the process and will shut down the service in April itself.