Early this afternoon via Google’s blog, they confirmed that hundreds of peoples email accounts were recently hacked again. Through various phishing scams and malware created to steal personal information from all affected individuals. They state the targets appear to be Senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel, Â journalists and even some personal accounts.
Google, along with the help of GMail users and an external report, were able to locate the malware’s source. The origin of the attack came from Jinan, China.
Google assures us that this attack was not due to any type of lacks in security on their end. I tend to agree; all too often we get clicking and signing into things and switching accounts that we don’t always pay attention to the signs of phishing. Take a look below at this image that was retrieved from a users temporary IE folder showing the phishing GMail access account vs. the Actual GMail account sign on page.
It is a pretty convincing looking page. I know it fooled me the other day. Luckily, I was sitting on my PC at the time and some of the emails they sent out came back as undeliverable. This could end very badly if you happen to have business contacts on your account. Have no fear though;Â Google has advised of a few ways to help prevent this in the future.
- Use two-factor authentication; Example below, as well as a video on the subject on YouTube
- Choose a strong password; Use one that you are not using on any other account. Use a combination of letters, numbers, symbols and caps to make cracking the password that much harder.
- Watch for suspicious activity warnings in your Gmail account;
- Check your settings for odd forwarding.
Google and Android are tied hand in hand. All of our information is linked through our phones and our PC’s. That connection is only getting stronger as days go by. I hope there weren’t to many people effected out there by these scammers, but I hope you all take the words of wisdom and add just a little more verification and protection for your own safety.
For more links and a few videos from Google, head on over to their official blogspot.
