Google has admitted that hundreds of users of its Gmail service have been the subject of a attack to collect users passwords. Google revealed the attack in a posting on its blog site. It stated that the attack seems to have come from China and affected users such as "senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists."
Google stated that it has detected and "disrupted" this attack, saying, "We have notified victims and secured their accounts. In addition, we have notified relevant government authorities." Google stated that the apparent object of this attack was to read the emails of the people who were affected by the attack "with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings." Google stressed that this attack did not actually affect any of its internal network systems, saying. " ... we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online."
Google"s blog post also went over how all users of its products can improve their security including using strong passwords, checking your Gmail accounts to see if there is any suspicious forwarding addresses and more. It also put in a plug for using its Chrome web browser, hinting strongly that the brower was better, security wise, than other web browsers.
Of course this is just the latest example of a mass cyber attack in the past couple of months. We have seen attacks on Sony"s Playstation Network which still hasn"t fully recovered as of this writing along with attacks on Lockheed Martin and other businesses.