Google Apologises For Saving Some G Suite Passwords Unencrypted

US tech giant Google has recently run into the same trap as Facebook did after it revealed that it's G Suite service had been storing passwords of some companies in plain text for years.

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In a statement, Google said that the problem has been around since 2005 and the company has told the G Suite administration to ensure that users reset their passwords.

"We recently notified a subset of our enterprise G Suite customers that some passwords were stored in our encrypted internal systems unhashed", Suzanne Frey, Vice President, Engineering, Cloud Trust at Google said.

Google has apologised for the mistake exposing passwords to hacking, but added that the problem had affected business users only.

"This is a G Suite issue that affects business users only — no free consumer Google accounts were affected", Suzanne Frey said.

The news comes as two other tech companies — Twitter and Facebook have faced the same issue. Most recently, Twitter notified all of its 330 million users about a security breach, asking them to take precautions and change their passwords. The company said that it had found a bug that led to user passwords being recorded in the journal in unencrypted form.

Earlier this year, Facebook said that its latest internal security review had revealed that the passwords of hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users had been kept in a plain "readable format" on its servers.