Google announced on Tuesday that they’d been they target of a phishing scam originating in Jinan, China, and aimed at the accounts of Chinese activists and senior officials in the U.S. Victims were sent fake emails with links to a fake Gmail site, which harvested the usernames and passwords of anyone trying to log in.

Which is scary. Also pretty cool – I mean, the fake Gmail looks pretty convincing. Obviously it’s not good – especially since accounts which were compromised had all of their mail sent to a third party, and their contact lists were used to mine more phising targets.

Says Google:

This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.

So yeah. Dang.

[Source: GoogleBlog]