Google said Chinese hackers targeted the e-mail accounts of senior U.S. officials and hundreds of prominent people, the latest revelation in an escalating series of computer attacks sure to intensify concern over Internet security.
Google revealed the information in a blog post by Eric Grosse, an engineering director on the search giant's security team, who said the recently disrupted campaign appears to originate in the Chinese city of Jinan in Shandong province. Grosse stressed that Google's system wasn't hacked, but rather its users were targeted and duped in a password scam, and the company has since notified them of the "hijacking," secured the affected accounts.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which counts more than 200 million users of its free, Web-based Gmail service didn't specify the identities of those whose accounts were affected, release details on how it traced the attacks, or provide information on who may be behind the incident.
"We have no reason to believe that any official U.S. government e-mail accounts were accessed," said Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security are working with Google to investigate the attacks.
Regardless of whether the cyber-attack was part of an espionage ring or a rogue organization or individual doing it for profit, this latest news comes on the heels of similar hacking incidents and is raising concern about the safety of government secrets.
Just last week, defense contractor Lockheed Martin revealed it detected a "significant and tenacious" attack against its computer network, employees at defense contract L-3 Communications were alerted about penetration attacks and Northrop Grumman recently halted work on remote network access, allegedly in response to cyber threats.
Some reports point out that Google's announcement of the password scam comes one day after military officials in the U.S. and United Kingdom acknowledged that cyber-attacks sponsored by other nations can be seen as an act of war.
This latest revelations comes just over a year after Google disclosed a highly sophisticated attack to its corporate infrastructure, which was also traced to the same region in China. This latest report, in addition to previous attacks and the search giant's chafing against Chinese censorship requests, is bound to strain an already tense relationship.
Google's Grosse advised all concerned Gmail users to take ten minutes to adopt a few safeguards like multistep verifications, strengthening passwords, and checking for suspicious forwarding addresses.
While the investigation is pending, the news will heighten concern over security, and will likely be a consideration in the U.S. government's new smartphone and email policies.
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