So What Would Happen If China Cracked Google?
Wondering just how badly Google has been compromised? And if I should be worried as a user of a ton of Google apps.
Always more to the story …
… losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a 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.
The program, code named Gaia for the Greek goddess of the earth, was attacked in a lightning raid taking less than two days last December, the person said. Described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago, the software is intended to enable users and employees to sign in with their password just once to operate a range of services.
The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the company quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks after the intrusions. But the theft leaves open the possibility, however faint, that the intruders may find weaknesses that Google might not even be aware of, independent computer experts said.
The new details seem likely to increase the debate about the security and privacy of vast computing systems such as Google’s that now centralize the personal information of millions of individuals and businesses. Because vast amounts of digital information are stored in one place, a single breach can lead to disastrous losses.
The theft began with a single instant message sent to a Google employee in China, according to the person with knowledge of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition 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.
The details surrounding the theft of the software have been a closely guarded secret by the company. Google first publicly disclosed the theft in a Jan. 12 posting on the company’s Web site, which stated that the company was changing its policy toward China in the wake of the theft of unidentified “intellectual property” and the apparent compromise of the e-mail accounts of two human rights activists.
What’s interesting is that this morning there were a rash of stories on US web security. Here’s a sample of the warning.
