Through the People’s Daily, the Chinese government has put forward a harsh warning to Google over claims that Gmail users were victims of a phishing scheme originating in China. From Reuters:
The tough warning appeared in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the leading newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party, indicating that political tensions between the United States and China over Internet security could linger.
Last week, Google said it had broken up an effort to steal the passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including U.S. government officials, Chinese human rights advocates and journalists. It said the attacks appeared to come from China.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected those accusations, and the party newspaper warned Google against playing a risky political game.
By saying that Chinese human rights activists were among the targets of the hacking, Google was “deliberately pandering to negative Western perceptions of China, and strongly hinting that the hacking attacks were the work of the Chinese government,” the People’s Daily overseas edition, a small offshoot of the main domestic paper, said in a front-page commentary.
“Google’s accusations aimed at China are spurious, have ulterior motives, and bear malign intentions,” said the commentary, written by an editor at the paper.
See also: “To: Defense Contractors; Subject: Tell Us Your Secrets” and “Cyberspies Target China Experts” from the Wall Street Journal, about phishing schemes which have ensnared U.S. defense contractors.
