Google Stops Gmail Phishing Scheme from China

Google today said that it’s “detected and disrupted” a plan to gain access to hundreds of Gmail accounts through phishing attacks. The attacks originated in Jinan, China and targeted Government Officials from the US and several Asian countries. The attacks also included individuals from the press, military as well as political activists.

“The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ e-mails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings,” wrote Eric Grosse the engineering director for Google’s security team in a post announcing the crackdown. He also said that “It’s important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected–these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online.”

Google has notified the people whose accounts are affected and has also secured the accounts. The company is prevailing on users to come up with more complex passwords and only going through the company’s secured “https://www.google.com” domain when logging on from a Web browser.