Couple of days ago a story made it to the Digg Frontpage titled Gmail security failure leaves my business sabotaged. This was the poor story of David Airey (a professional logo designer) who lost his domain Davidairey.com to an Internet hacker and password cracker due to a flaw in Gmail’s security system.

The hacker somehow managed to get into David’s Gmail inbox through a backdoor and got details about his domain registrar. Then using his login credentials, the hacker transfered David’s domain to his account on GoDaddy.

Fortunately, David has reclaimed his domain name and is back online with all his business but this leaves us all with lots of questions in our minds about Gmail security.

David’s Gmail account was hacked due to a previously known Gmail security issue which could allow a third party malicious site to add a backdoor to your Gmail Filters without your knowledge. This issue has been rectified now by the Gmail team but unless a backdoor was added to your Gmail account before the fix, it is more likely that the Backdoor is still lying there in your Gmail Filters and is able to grant access to your Gmail inbox to an external entity.

To ensure maximum security, open your Gmail inbox and then navigate to your Gmail Settings. Open the Filters tab and make sure that there are no filters that forward your mails to some malicious third party sites. Take a look at the attached screenshot of a possible backdoor that can leak your secure information to external entities.