Google has revealed that U.S. government officials and Chinese activists were the targets of a recent Gmail phishing attack that originated from China.
“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 engineering director Eric Grosse said on the company’s blog. “This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.”
Google said that the attack was focused on monitoring the content of the targeted users by secretly forwarding emails from compromised accounts. The attack is reminiscent of last year’s famous Google security breach instigated by Chinese hackers.
“Google detected and has disrupted this campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails,” Grosse added. “We have notified victims and secured their accounts.” The search giant is now encouraging users to activate a two-step verification process to prevent unauthorized access from new computers.
This is at least the second attack targeting Google accounts by Chinese hackers. The first time it occurred, Google nearly pulled out of China and caused a firestorm of controversy by refusing to censor its search engine. This time, Google tried to bury the lede and not turn this into another Google vs. China fiasco. Perhaps that’s the wiser move: after all, people are fooled by phishing scams all the time, even senior U.S. officials.
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