Hackers appearing to originate from Jinan, China have hijacked the Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) email accounts of hundreds of users, including the personal accounts of senior U.S. government officials, Google said June 1.

In a blog post by Eric Grosse, engineering director of Google's security team, Google said it uncovered a likely phishing scam to collect user passwords. Having gained access to Gmail accounts, the hackers, which appear to originate from Jinan, monitored the content of the email and may have changed the automatic forwarding settings of the email accounts.

Besides federal government officials, other victims include Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, predominantly South Korea, military personnel and journalists, Grosse says.

Google relied on its "cloud-based security and abuse detection systems" as well as user feedback and a threat warning posted on a malware blog called "contagio."

"Our internal systems have not been affected--these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself," Grosse said. "But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online."

The contagio warning says that emails containing attachments appearing to originate from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the office of the secretary of defense were sent to Gmail accounts with subject headers such as "Re: 2010_Security rationale for reducing NWs."

One email with the subject header "Fw: Draft US-China Joint Statement" included in the body of the email a statement that "This is the latest version of State's joint statement. My understanding is that state put in placeholder econ language am happy to have us fill in but in their rush to get a cleared version from the WH, they send the attached to Mike." The email includes an attachment named "Joint Statement - US draft_KC edits.com"

For more:
- go to the Google blog post
- go to the contagio blog post

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