For about two and a half hours on Monday, students at Oxford University couldn't access Google Docs after the University's Computing Services team decided to take "extreme action" to halt phishing attacks and also to put pressure on Google.

Robin Stevens of OxCert explained in a blog post that, in the past, Google has been slow to respond to requests to help the university. The university's problem is that phishers are frequently using Google Docs to present phishing forms to its users, with a legitimate domain shown to the user and not detectable by firewalls as Google traffic is over SSL. If phishing mail directing users to pages like this gets past the defenses, it is hard to detect and respond to.

Google's security team have pointed the university at the "Report Abuse" button at the bottom of the Docs pages, but this takes time, at least a day or two and sometimes weeks, before Google respond. By that time the phishing attack is long gone; any users who would have been fooled will have most likely clicked a link within hours of the dubious mail arriving.

On Monday afternoon, the security team at Oxford were seeing multiple phishing incidents taking place and that tipped things over the edge; after considering the impact on legitimate business, it blocked Google Docs to prevent the phishing attacks deploying their information extracting forms. Stevens says the impact was actually greater on legitimate business than expected due to Google's tight integration of Docs with other services, so, after two and a half hours, the restrictions were lifted.

He hopes that the temporary block will at least draw attention within the university to the dangers of phishing. He also hopes that Google will, with the resources at its disposal, find some way to automate responses to abuse reports. He closes saying "Google may not themselves be being evil, but their inaction is making it easier for others to conduct evil activities using Google-provided services."