At the beginning of May, a phishing scam flooded the web, disguised as a typical Google Docs request. Some of the emails even appeared to come from acquaintances. If victims clicked through and granted seemingly innocuous permissions, they exposed their entire Gmail account to whoever was behind the scam. It was an explosive scheme. And Google responded in kind. “We convened what we call a war room,” says Mark Risher, Google’s director of counter-abuse technology.

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