Google China Attack Hit GOOG´s Password System
April 19, 2010The Chinese hacker attack on Google last January hit the search company’s crown jewels: Gaia, Google’s “password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications.” Click the link to read the NYT’s story.
What gets me the most is that the entire thing started because a Google engineer clicked a poisoned link:
The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft’s Messenger program, according to the person with knowledge of the internal inquiry, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
By clicking on a link and connecting to a “poisoned” Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team.
Obviously Microsoft had nothing to do with anything, but there must be a poetic something-or-other involved here.
