Chinese Government Denies Involvement In Latest Gmail Hack

Sites include Gmail.com . Published on June 4th, 2011. Written by Chad Buenaflor.

The Chinese Government through its Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei released a statement denying any involvement in the recent Gmail phishing attack that compromised hundreds of user accounts. Chinese networks are in fact also being targeted by hackers and the country is working to stop this problem.

The latest Gmail attack which specifically targeted the personal accounts of top U.S. government officials as well as prominent Chinese activists was traced to come from Jinan, China. This is also the origin of the attack on Google’s system which happened 17 months ago.

The attack relied on phishing tactics that tricked people into believing that the information they are getting comes from an official source. The message will usually ask for your login credentials for verification purposes. Once the victim inputs their password the hackers will then have access to the email account.

The U.S. Department of Defense said that they had little to work on in this latest attack since the email accounts were not official government accounts but merely personal email accounts. They also said that they don’t have any information on whether the targeted officials were defense employees or not.

In China, the Xinhua News Agency released an article blasting Google saying that the company was making baseless accusations and had no proof that the attacks originated from China.