Fred Trotter, the executive of healthcare research startup CareSet and healthcare startup DocGraph recently got to work only to find that Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) had locked him out of his cloud computing service.
The CEO reported to work as usual on Monday morning only to finds that Alphabet had shut down his firm’s account on the Google Cloud computing service, worrying him and his team. Trotter received a warning that one of his systems had been carrying out intrusive attacks against third parties. Alphabet condemned the act and warned the executive and his team that the problem should be fixed. Alternatively, they were expected to explain the legitimacy of the unexpected network traffic.
Alphabet threatened to terminate the cloud services if the CEO and his team failed to carry out any of the requests. According to Trotter, CareSet lost a lot of time trying to find out what the emails from Alphabet meant and three days passed leading to the shutdown. Trotter has since then responded via a blog claiming that the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) system most likely misread the company’s traffic. The executive believes that the IDS suspected malicious intent even when there was none.
A spokesperson from Alphabet responded claiming that there was a problem with the startup’s site and that Alphabet is working on giving better instructions in the future. Trotter later opened up to Fortune and reported that his firm made a configuration error that allowed for abuse of the site and that is why the IDS system detected the intrusion attacks. This means that Alphabet’s system was indeed correct and the threat was legitimate. Despite the findings, Trotter still maintained his ground that Alphabet’s emails were unclear and not very helpful.
Alphabet however cleared up the matter and the problem was detected, solved and the account was restored. The situation was, therefore, a vital opportunity for both Alphabet and CareSet to address various issues for the improvement of both the Cloud service and the CareSet website.