Hackers attacked Google employees' friends

probe

It appears that the hackers who hit google (eg gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents) did research to find out the identity of google staff and their friends.

They got the friends to send their google staff acquaintances "click on this link" stuff (eg emails, social networking links etc).

The google staff thinking that the links were coming from a trustworthy source clicked on the links. The links took advantage of the security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer to install malware - which presumably among other things used keystroke logging to capture google corporate system user IDs and passwords and send them back to the hackers. Which in turn gave them "root" access to gmail and other google files.

Points arising:

1) Google claims to be a "do no evil" company. Yet they are collecting huge amounts of data on people's search - which could be linked to the individuals' identity (eg via gmail or otherwise) which is clearly at risk of hacking from private hackers or people working for governments.

2) Google allows its employees to use Internet Explorer!!! (I wouldn't object to Google having some PCs ringfenced in a laboratory to test their webservice product experience for IE users) - but they would need to treat this as the electronic equivalent of a laboratory that experiments with anthrax...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c18091ee-09ee-11df-8b23-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

Mitch Connor

I would have thought most Google employees use Chrome. Oh well.