Researchers of the Cloud Security Intelligence unit from RedLock warn of the possible leakage of sensitive data from hundreds of organizations as a result of incorrect settings of the Google Groups web service.

The researchers noticed that many users of the Google Groups for Business service allowed access to their groups. Such a mistake in the settings led to the disclosure of important information of company employees, including names, email addresses, home addresses, salary data, sales data and user passwords.

"We wanted to find just one example of such a case, but found dozens.

Perhaps hundreds of companies have suffered from erroneous settings "- commented in the company RedLock. The list of affected companies turned out to be The Weather Company, owned by IBM, Fusion Media Group, owning Gizmodo, The Onion, Jezebel and Lifehacker, as well as the SpotX platform, which sends out advertisements to 600 million people around the world.

Google Groups is a service through which users can create and participate in discussion groups. When setting up groups, the creator must configure the access settings.