Oh my goodness you guys there is so much hacking going on right now! Future historians will probably look back at the past week and label it, “the week of the hack.” Between the PBS website hacking and Weinergate, and now this whole mess involving Google and the dastardly Chinese, my dang head is spinning!
So yesterday afternoon Google published a blog post flat-out accusing the Chinese government of hacking into the gmail accounts of high-level U.S. government officials, among others.
Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems*, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. 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.
The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings. (Gmail enables you to forward your emails automatically, as well as grant others access to your account.)
Google detected and has disrupted this campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails. We have notified victims and secured their accounts. In addition, we have notified relevant government authorities.
Hmmm…I wonder if this has something to do with the ominous Defense Department “leak” that emerged earlier this week, the one in which the world was warned that hacking the U.S. government could result in, well, war?
Regardless, this was China’s official response…
Haha…KIDDING! China is actually quite pissed over having a finger pointed at them and today denied that they did anything.
Google’s allegation that hackers based in China accessed hundreds of Gmail accounts, including some belonging to senior U.S. officials, drew angry denials from Chinese government officials on Thursday, with a foreign ministry spokesman calling the accusation “a fabrication out of thin air.”
Asked repeatedly at a news conference about the hacking, the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the accusations against China are “unacceptable.”
Vast quantities of e-mail content were accessed, according to two people with knowledge of the breach. They said the FBI was notified last week and that there was some debate within Google about whether to publicize the incident, because to do so could foreclose investigative options.
The most interesting thing about this to me is that high level government officials are apparently using their personal email accounts to conduct official business — a classic ass-covering tactic, as personal email accounts usually can’t be subpoenaed.
Bottom line: These two evil empires, Google and China, have been calling each names and pussy-footing around for years and should just get it over with and go to war, or f*ck, or both. It’s what all the evil empires are doing these days.
(Pic via)
