China dismisses Google's hacking claims

China rejected the allegations of hacking Google-email accounts of US officials, military personal and journalist.

Blaming these misdeeds on China is unacceptable. Hacking is an international problem and China is also a victim. The claims of so-called support for hacking are completely unfounded and have ulterior motives, said Hong Lei, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson agitated by the search giant’s blame of steeling passwords and manipulating peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings.

Google, on Wednesday said, it has disrupted a hacking effort that appears to be originated from China, targeting Gmail accounts of various people, including senior U.S. government officials.

Eric Grosse, Engineering Director, Google Security Team wrote in a blog post, Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. 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.

It’s difficult to analyze whether government or individuals are responsible for such crime as the victims were people who had access to sensitive and even secret information.