A hacker in China gained access to hundreds of Gmail accounts, including those of senior U.S. government officials, military personnel, Chinese political activists and journalists, Google acknowledged yesterday.
On its official blog, Google said it recently detected a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. The breach seemed to originate from Jinan, China, and impacted the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including public-sector officials in the United States and several Asian countries.
The hacker’s goal seems to have been to monitor the contents of the compromised users’ emails, using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings, Google said.
The search engine giant said it has notified victims and secured their accounts, as well as alerted relevant government authorities.
