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<h1>Student collects 15 million Gmail addresses
More than 7,100 sets of 5,000 links to Google profiles may be just what spammers are looking for. In his blog, a student from the University of Amsterdam reports that he gathered around 15 million Gmail addresses from Google user profiles within a month. Matthijs Koot analysed just under 35 million profile links from Google's profile site map, which is easily accessible on the company's servers. Koot says he used the same IP address for all of the 35 million queries, but Google didn't attempt to stop the mass download. A Google spokesperson told British IT news source The Register that the site map does not make any information available that is not already publicly accessible.
The site map contains URLs to more than 7,100 text files with 5,000 profile links each. Site maps help other Web services map a web site's structure – in this case, for the indexing of Google profiles. In a lot of cases, Koot was not only able to get the Google user's user name (from which the person's Gmail address can be derived), but also the person's real name, information about education, employment history, current employer, place of residence, links to Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and the profile holder's Picasa photo albums. Spammers, for example, could use this data for personalised advertising attacks.
More than 7,100 sets of 5,000 links to Google profiles may be just what spammers are looking for. In his blog, a student from the University of Amsterdam reports that he gathered around 15 million Gmail addresses from Google user profiles within a month. Matthijs Koot analysed just under 35 million profile links from Google's profile site map, which is easily accessible on the company's servers. Koot says he used the same IP address for all of the 35 million queries, but Google didn't attempt to stop the mass download. A Google spokesperson told British IT news source The Register that the site map does not make any information available that is not already publicly accessible.
The site map contains URLs to more than 7,100 text files with 5,000 profile links each. Site maps help other Web services map a web site's structure – in this case, for the indexing of Google profiles. In a lot of cases, Koot was not only able to get the Google user's user name (from which the person's Gmail address can be derived), but also the person's real name, information about education, employment history, current employer, place of residence, links to Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and the profile holder's Picasa photo albums. Spammers, for example, could use this data for personalised advertising attacks.
More plus screenshot: http://www.h-online....es-1251356.html
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