FBI investigating Chinese hand in Gmail account hacking

“Threats to information and communications infrastructure pose a serious economic and national security challenge for the US and our partners,which is why the president has made cyber security one of his top priorities,” he said.

“As with all intrusions,we employ an all-of-government approach with the appropriate agency in the lead. In this case,the FBI is coordinating a response. We’re obviously aware of these reports. We’re looking into these reports. We have no reason to believe,at this point,that any official US government email accounts were accessed,” Carney said.

As of now,he said,there has been no impact on the US government policy,with regard to work emails,which is driven by the Presidential Records Act. “So the issue in terms of our work accounts,there we have no evidence to suggest that any of those accounts were accessed or compromised.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also expressed her deep concern over the issue.

“We are obviously very concerned about Google’s announcement regarding a campaign that the company believes originated in China to collect the passwords of Google email account holders,” she said,adding that Google informed the State Department of this situation yesterday in advance of its public announcement.

“These allegations are very serious. We take them seriously,we’re looking into them,and because this will be an ongoing investigation,I would refer you to first Google for any details that they are able to share at this time and to the FBI,which will be conducting the investigation,” she said.

On Thursday,the Internet search giant had said “bad actors” from China,in a sophisticated phishing attack,hacked into hundreds of Gmail accounts,including those of senior US officials and Chinese political activists.

Google has uncovered a “phishing campaign,” which “appears to originate from Jinan,China” in which access was gained to Gmail user passwords and emails,its Security Team’s Engineering Director Eric Grosse said in a blog post.

“Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems,we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords,likely through phishing,” he said.

The “bad actors” hacked into personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including,senior US government officials,Chinese political activists,officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea),military personnel and journalists,the US internet giant stated.

“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.”

Meanwhile,China had denied any official involvement in cyber attacks saying that putting all the phishing blames on it is “unacceptable.”

“To put all the blame on China is unacceptable. The Chinese government pay a great attention to cyber security and administer internet according to law,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei had told reporters in Beijing.