India Internet News
US Officers Gmail Accounts Attacked By Chinese Hackers
02 June 2011
The search engine giant Google said in one of the recent attack by China based hackers more than hundreds of Gmail accounts were compromised, along with those of senior US government officers and military people.
According to Google's yesterdays comment "Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing." Google has disclosed a "phishing campaign," that "appears to originate from Jinan, China" and allowed to get access of Gmail user passwords and emails, as per a blog comment made by Google Security Team's Engineering Director Eric Grosse.
The "bad actors" attacked hundreds of Gmail accounts such as senior US government officers, Chinese political players, officers in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military people and journalists. "The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples' forwarding and delegation settings."
As per the Washington Post information, the Gmail account of one Cabinet-level officer was also hacked.
But the lady speaker of National Security Council, Caitlin Hayden, assured that there is no point in believing that any US government officer's email accounts was compromised.