China Calls Google Hacking Allegations a Fabrication
On Thursday, China rejected accusations from Google that it is behind the series of hacking attacks on its email service. It also says that critics have ‘ulterior motives’ in trying to blame the Beijing government.
This followed emerged news on Wednesday from Google that hackers in China have stolen the Gmail login details of hundreds of senior government officials in the US and South Korea. They have also stolen the email details of Chinese political activists. The company has warned victims of the ‘phishing’ scam and made a statement about the threat to the public. It says it can’t say for sure who is responsible, but many of the attacks have been traced to Jinan, the Shandong province capital and a suspected cyber espionage centre.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman says that it’s unacceptable that Beijing has been blamed for this. Hacking attacks are an issue on an international level, and China is a victim as well. It’s a total fabrication that the Chinese government supports hacking attacks, and there are ulterior motives to these accusations.
It has also emerged that an independent blogger broke the news about a series of attacks on her ‘personal interest blog’ more than 3 months ago. Mila Parkour, an IT worker based in Washington D.C., says that ’spear phishing’, the method used, was far from sophisticated or new and was particularly invasive. She described how the attack worked, and it matches the same ammo of the Gmail accounts that were attacked.
This isn’t the first time that Google and the Chinese government have clashed. In January last year, the search engine giant said it wouldn’t censor its search service based in China according to the government’s demands because of the intrusion on human rights activists’ email accounts. In response, the Chinese government has withdrawn the company’s licence for mainland-based search operations.