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NEW DELHI: Over the years Internet search has been evolving, today one can search almost anything on the Net. But then as they say, technology is both a bane and a boon. Google Search recently exposed the credit card information of 19,000 British Web surfers.
According to a report in Telegraph, the data, which includes names and home addresses as well as full card information, was accessible through a simple Google search. According to the report, the details of thousands of Visa, Mastercard and American Express customers were mistakenly put in the public domain by fraudsters, who planned to sell it on to other scammers. A spokesman for the banking industry body APACS said that most of the cards on the list had already been cancelled, but there are concerns that their owners were not made aware that they had been leaked online. Incidentally, the data was originally posted on an unsecured server in Vietnam used by criminal gangs. Though the site closed down in February, the information remained available on a "cached" version of the page on Google, which stores historical snapshots of websites even after they are removed. The report quotes a Google spokesman saying that the information has now been removed.