Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results
Hopefully, there’s a lesson in all this, but it could just be “stop shooting yourself in the foot.”Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Anonymity is available upon request.Our story today comes courtesy of Siim Kostabi, co-founder of Pageloot, a company that provides QR codes businesses can use for marketing. Kostabi’s tale of tech terror reminds us that credentials, even for a staging server, have a lot of value in the wrong hands.
- ▪Hopefully, there’s a lesson in all this, but it could just be “stop shooting yourself in the foot.”Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network?
- ▪Anonymity is available upon request.Our story today comes courtesy of Siim Kostabi, co-founder of Pageloot, a company that provides QR codes businesses can use for marketing.
- ▪Kostabi’s tale of tech terror reminds us that credentials, even for a staging server, have a lot of value in the wrong hands.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | theregister |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/13/passwords-stored-in-public-google-doc-then-showed-up-in-search-results/5287028 |
| Publication time | Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-13T07:30:48.301Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-13T07:30:48.301Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); SECURITY Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results Developer spotted hostname and credential string lurking in autocomplete Avram Piltch Avram Piltch US EDITOR US editor Published thu 13 Aug 2026 // 08:00 UTC PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight others’ security failures.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at theregister.
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