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nobody seems to be commenting on the attack part of that post. what was the "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google"?

that doesn't sound like just a few end-user gmail accounts being compromised, but something that was much more serious that may have exposed more information than just what these chinese attackers were looking for.

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Wikileaks says:

Gossip inside google China is gov hackers found infiltrating google source code repository; gmail attacks an old issue.

http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7688415363

EDIT: I see "est" mentioned this rumor, too.

BTW, a CNN producer is tweeting that Google CN workers may have been sent home early. Conspiracy theorists would say that supports the idea of an attack from the inside. Or maybe Google just had mercy on its staff and knew they wouldn't get any work done today anyway.

http://twitter.com/joCNN/status/7702905501

"an attack from the inside" Of course it was. China is an insider's society.

Google may have even sent the employees home to help protect them. If they seem uninvolved in Google's decision to uncensor, then it's less likely that the employees will face punishment from the Government.

For some background information:

GFW research team tried heavily to crack down the SSL certificate for gmail (thus, they can censor the gmail content through GFW).

Does it has anything to do with http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg03928.ht... ?

The programmers who work for GFW ( China Greet Firewall using to Prohibit Chinese people access to sensitive political information) will give birth to children without anus

sometimes hackers hack for money

为什么美国不来个反GFW项目你禁止国内访问外网的某些网站，那我也以其人之道还治其人之身把关键网站也对中国封掉，比如科技IEEE，教育，医疗等著名网站，把中国真正变成一个局域网。那时候详细国内的网民该疯了

Translation:

"Why doesn't America create an anti-GFW project. You block people in China accessing websites outside of China, so I give you your own medicine, block China from accessing some key websites, such as technology IEEE, education, medicine, and other famous websites, then China would genuinely become a local area network. Then webizens within China would genuinely go mad"

The Chinese should free them by their own hands

Because that would be stooping to China's level.

I really need a software called "Anti-GFW".

most chinese know nothing about the GFW! even now! most chinese know nothing about the true story of why google is going to leave! nobody could help chinese to build a better gov, and they just fool all of themselves. i wanna find a chance to get away from Beijing but...how?

Maybe it takes a highly sophisticated attach just to get that much out of gmail.

> the theft of intellectual property from Google

To me, that implies more than just customer information (i.e. private data in a gmail account).

Total speculation, but source code and private keys would be especially useful if you wanted to crack gmail and track down dissidents or generally read people's email.

I think gmail's attach is pretty basic. Just like any other mail program.

10 bucks on 0day.

As I commented elsewhere in this post, gossip is that the attack was launched from _within_ the Chinese offices of Google, not just from the Internet.

oh! That's even more interesting. The security community spins lots of FUD talking about the "insider threat," but there's very little real data to back up the threat.

"Credible data describing the scope and impact of unwelcome insider actions are hard to come by..."

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Salvatore J. Stolfo, "Addressing the Insider Threat," IEEE Security and Privacy, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 10-13, Nov./Dec. 2009, doi:10.1109/MSP.2009.146 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MSP.2009...

Rumors on twitter says it's Google Shanghai Office employees trying to crack Gmail from Google's internal network

All Chinese Googler were suspended from Google's internal source code and network access for now.

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