Image via CrunchBaseIt was revealed by Trend Micro, on Friday that the recent cyber attacks aimed to penetrate were not only aimed the online email services of Google, but also Microsoft and Yahoo! According to the investigation of a US federal agent, these Gmail spying efforts were successfully countered by Google. Trend Micro made another allegation that both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail were also subjected to the same hack attacks. The senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, Nart Villeneuve, stated in an online post that "there has been a variety of recent attacks on popular Webmail platforms." He declared that "in addition to Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have also been targeted. While the attacks appear to have been separately conducted, these have some significant similarities."
Google made the announcement this Wednesday that a cyber spying attack, which was allegedly originated from somewhere in China, was aimed to target the Gmail accounts of several senior US officials, military personnel, journalists, Chinese political activists, along with the officials of several Asian countries, mainly in South Korea. Eric Grosse, the head of Google’s security division stated in his official blog post that "We recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing." He added that "The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords." Allegedly the campaign was technically traced back to be originated from Jinan, the capital of eastern Chinese province of Shandong. Grosse reported that these attacks were aimed to penetrate the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of Gmail users.
It was also revealed by other sources that Trend Micro, that these attacks were actually aimed at other major emailing services including Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail too. Apparently all these attempts were in the hope for viewing and reading the personal or official messages sent by those users and. Along with tracing the users activity on the services, the attackers also made use of such threats which could search the computers of these hacked users associated with those email addresses, for gathering more information regarding the type of software’s being used in their operating system. "Once the attackers know what software is installed on a target's computer, including antivirus products, they can craft a precise attack targeting any vulnerable software," Villeneuve said. "Such an attack will then have a high probability of success."
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