Hackers are actively exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Adobe's Flash Player, the company revealed Sunday.
The Gmail database is not congested, and Google is not asking users to confirm that their accounts are still active.
But, it seems that scammers are hoping that you might believe that's true, according to one of the latest phishing attacks that has been spammed across the net.
Here's what a typical email looks like:
Google is "trying to provoke a new dispute between China and the US" and has become a "political tool", said a front-page editorial of the Chinese-language People's Daily Overseas, an offshoot of the Communist party's main newspaper mouthpiece.
"Google's accusations aimed at China are spurious, have ulterior motives, and bear malign intentions," the commentary said.
Mac OS X never took off in the same way that Windows did. But I suspect that Google Chromebooks will either push users away from Mac OS X towards iOS devices, or have a stranger effect: bring iOS users of the iPad and iPhone closer to its Mac OS X sibling.
With three major desktop operating systems — Windows, Mac OS X and the million variants of Linux — there will soon be another, in a manner of speaking. Google Chrome OS will be pre-installed and supported by Chromebooks — dedicated light hardware which will run the cloud-based feature set of the operating system.
The Chinese government has denied any involvement in the recent cyber attack on Gmail, calling Google’s allegations ‘unacceptable’.
The search engine giant had launched a fresh controversy by claiming that Chinese hackers had stolen Gmail log-in credentials belonging to several US and South Korean government officials and Chinese human rights activists. A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry dismissed the attacks as an international incident and claimed that people accusing the Chinese government had ‘ulterior motives’.
The White House says no official U.S. government email accounts were accessed during what Google alleges was Chinese hacking of its email systems. Obama spokesman Jay Carney says the FBI is investigating Google ( GOOG - news - people )'s allegations, but had no comment on whether China was involved. Google says personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists, were exposed.
The attacks on the US government officials by China-based hackers targeted personal accounts, rather than trying to break into better-secured federal systems. Not only Google's Gmail was targeted; Yahoo accounts are also known to have been among those hit. It is not known whether any accounts on Microsoft's Hotmail system were hit.
The White House said on Wednesday reports that hackers tried to get into Google email accounts were being investigated but it did not believe U.S. government email accounts were breached in the attack.
Facebook users can now have a more secure log-in to their accounts as Facebook tightened the log-in verification process, Via Facebook Blog.
By activating the new feature in the security section of the account settings page, the user will have a new security feature integrated into their login procedure called Log-in Approvals. The two-step process involves entering a username and password along with a numeric verification code sent to the user’s mobile phone.
Reports that cybercriminals have been hosting their IT resources on Amazon's cloud systems have been around for a while, but now it appears that hackers are using the Google Docs platform, according to Mikko Hypponen, chief researcher with F-Secure.
According to Hypponen, because spreadsheets can contain a variety of functionality, even to the extent of interactive forms, it seems that cybercriminals are now hosting these on the Google Docs system.
