Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2011, as news from 2 June 2011, the day after Google disclosed the campaign against Gmail users.
Google has just been hit by an attack by hackers whose aim was to take over hundreds of Gmail accounts belonging to US government officials, journalists, senior military officers, Chinese activists and officials from several Asian countries. The FBI is working with Google to trace the source of the attack, and so far everything points to it having been carried out from China.
Google’s disagreements and problems with China over its censorship policy are nothing new, but now it seems things have gone too far.
Google‘s head of security has said that the goal of the attack was to monitor the contents of these people’s emails, for purposes that are still unknown.
Fortunately, Google spotted the attack in time and managed to stop it, so the intrusion was never completed. Google has contacted the apparent targets to ask them to change and secure their passwords and to watch out for anything unusual in the service.
China, for its part, has already responded, saying it is a very serious accusation and that, of course, it had nothing to do with it. However, if we look back, China was already behind an attack on Google’s servers and a block on Gmail in the country, leading Chinese users to believe they were dealing with technical problems when it was really a deliberate “cut in service”.
The debate about how safe our data is online has been reopened.
Featured image: Blogtrepreneur, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
