Chinese hackers attacked US officials' e-mail accounts

Google on June 1 said hackers in China (China) broke into email accounts of hundreds of officials, senior military officers and journalists of the United States.

Google said its security system has not been breached and they have discovered and destroyed these intrusions. All victims have been identified and their Gmail accounts have been secured.

Hackers in China broke into Gmail accounts of hundreds of US officials
(Artwork: Reuters ).

Following the case, this American company discovered the source of the attacks from Jinan - China. Many political activists and high-ranking Chinese officials as well as other Asian countries are also the targets of these attacks.

In Washington, the White House said it was investigating the report but did not expect the official US e-mail accounts to be compromised. According to Google 's technical report , the latest attack uses a trick to trick users by tricking them into logging into sites similar to Google's Gmail service, but actually run by hackers.

When they get the addresses and passwords of email users, hackers will use that account to scam other accounts they target. Analysts are very headache because of this incident because it is difficult to determine whether this is an attack by individuals or organizations.

However, it is worth noting that the victims are all characters that are related to sensitive information, even national secrets. Therefore, the possibility of attackers may be informatics spies, not merely a computer crime.

However, this attack did not show any connection to the origin of sophisticated attacks that occurred in China in 2009 and early last year. That attack targeted Google's own security systems and sparked a escalating war with the Chinese government on online censorship. This has made Google more difficult to do business in the world's most populous country.