Despite its high levels of security, data breaches at Google are nothing new. However, so far in the 21st century, there hasn’t been one as large as the one reveal last Monday, May 27th .
Towards the end of March of this year, documents for the Google Search API content store, intend for internal use, were releas via GitHub . From late March to late May, this documentation was mov to the Hexdocs repository , in addition to circulating through other sources. And then, the lid was blown off.
What happen
On May 5, Rand Fishkin receiv an email from an europe cell phone number list anonymous source later identifi as Efran Azimi . In the email, Azimi claim to have access to internal documents from Google’s search engine.
Although the Google repository leak had reportly been resolv by May 7 , the documents remain on publicly accessible pages . So on May 24, Fishkin and Azimi held a video call, during which Azimi show the documentation and explain his motivations to Fishkin.
How did it all go? Fishkin, a self-proclaim retir SEO
Was the SEO king at MOZ in the early 2010s leak documents: key points for seo with his “whiteboard friday” videos, which enchant all of us SEO wannabes who admir his style and knowlge. Rand Fishkin is now the Founder and CEO of the audience analytics platform Sparktoro , and he confirm with former Google employees that these were legitimate documents.
Their next step was to enlist Mike King (technical SEO expert, Founder & CEO of iPullRank ) to decipher the documentation. Once King complet an initial analysis of the document and shar the results with Fishkin, the two publish china numbers articles on the topic… And the rest is history.