Google Hacked: Numerous Google Accounts Stolen
May 3rd 2017: People today have been plagued with numerous emails in their google inbox today. Part of a phishing scam, the suspicious looking emails have been forwarded to thousands of google accounts.
According to Forbes, the malicious email messages come from attackers posing as trusted user contacts. These contacts then forward an email, that looks like a Google Document to targets. Once the recipient clicks on the document, in an attempt to open it: the document then asks for various permissions like the ability to read, write, send and delete messages, the ability to manage emails and contacts.
Once an oblivious user, ends up granting these permissions to the app in order to open the document, the attacker has total control over the user's Gmail account. This worm is being used to access emails, contacts and sensitive information all around the world.
The phishing attack has been spreading like wildfire and google has been plagued with tweets from concerned users that have been affected by the attack.
Jaime Blasco, chief scientist at AlienVault was quoted saying "I don't believe they(APT28) are behind this though because this is way too widespread. Many people/organizations have received similar attempts so this is probably something massive and less targeted"
No matter who might be behind the attack, the damage to Google and its users has been already done. People that have been affected by the worm, have essentially been compromised off their Google accounts.
Although Google has shut down the attack by revoking the app and killing the pages set up by the attacker, this worm is still one of the widest spread cyber-attacks of our age.