Iranians Gmail accounts on attack over presidential election

As Iranians go to poll today, Friday, thousands of Gmail accounts belonging to Iranian users have been targeted in what Google described as an extensive hacking campaign in the election week closely monitored presidential elections.

According to Google, the attacks were broad "email-based phishing" attempts which seek to trick unwary Gmail users into giving up their user names and passwords, stressing such attacks have been traced to Iran and allegedly showed to be "politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election on Friday, June 13."

Also, Google said it owes users an alert on "state-sponsored attacks and other suspicious activity," but did not identify the perpetrators beyond saying that it appeared to be the same group behind a Gmail hacking campaign in 2011 involving fraudulent digital certificates.

DigitalSENSE Business News gathered that Google had on its security blog Wednesday, posted a screenshot of a phishing email purporting to be from Google administrators. The email, sent from the account "Email.Settings@gmail.com," contained a link to a fake sign-in page that asked for the user's Gmail credentials.

"Protecting our users' accounts is one of our top priorities, so we notify targets of state-sponsored attacks and other suspicious activity, and we take other appropriate actions to limit the impact of these attacks on our users," Google declared.

DigitalSENSE Business News recalled that in 2011, a young Iranian student who claimed credit for hacking Gmail accounts belonging to anti-government dissidents told the international press that he acted out of patriotism but denied any connection to the Iranian government.

Correspondent/ DigitalSENSE Business News
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