Google said it had uncovered a campaign run from inside China to secretly monitor the e-mails of hundreds of senior US government figures, South Korean officials and other users of its Gmail service.
The claim, made in a company blog post on Wednesday, marks the most serious allegation of China-based internet intrusion since the search company revealed in January last year that its own systems had been successfully hacked. It cited that breach in its decision to end its self-censorship in China, eventually leading it to relocate its local search service to Hong Kong.
This time, Google laid the blame for the latest security intrusions on so-called “phishing” attacks or other similar techniques that had been used to trick e-mail users into giving away their passwords, rather than any breach in its own systems.