Gmail attacked by phishing scam

Wednesday 07 October 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Internet giant Google admitted to the BBC on Tuesday that users of its web-based e-mail system, Gmail, had been subject to an attack from hackers, with passwords then posted on line. The news came hard on the heels of reports that up to 10,000 Hotmail addresses had suffered similar phishing assaults, being posted on line at Pastebin, a website used by developers to share code.

More than 30,000 email account details posted online

Gmail Homepage

According to the BBC News website, a second list of some 20,000 names has emerged on line, featuring e-mail addresses and passwords from Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other service providers.

In a statement, Google said, "We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts." The search giant insisted that fewer than 500 of its accounts had been affected by the scam and that the company had acted immediately to safeguard the affected accounts. Ominously, however, Google also revealed that it had discovered a third list, but would not say how many accounts were affected there.

"As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them," said Google, adding that the phishing was not a breach of Gmail security but rather "a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers".

Although some of the 20,000 accounts seem to be old, dormant or fake, many are genuine. Yahoo urged users to "take measures to secure their accounts whenever possible, including changing their passwords". This is sound advice, as many Internet users are not sufficiently cautious in their selection of passwords, using the same ones to access various sites. Indeed, a recent report by security firm Sophos showed that some 40% of people had the same password for every website they used.

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