Google has warned “high-profile” Gmail users working for the US Government that they are potentially being targeted by Chinese state-backed hackers. Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has announced that hackers are after sensitive information and that phishing attacks on email services have been successfully blocked.
Google also said in a statement that they could not identify any relevance of the attack campaign to the Ukraine war. TAG also warned earlier this week of Russian, Belarusian and Chinese hacker attacks targeting Ukrainian and European governments and military establishments endpoints with “pervasive” phishing and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Since 2012, Google sends notifications to affected customers when it detects attacks using infrastructure known to be linked to government-backed threat actors. Last year, 50,000 people were warned in this way. It is estimated that at least 15,000 of these attacks were carried out by the APT28 group, which is thought to have ties to the Russian secret service.