Recently, there has been circulation of reports that a hacker could gain control of Gmail accounts and work towards gmail users' GoDaddy accounts. Claims by victims of such activities grew by the day and media coverage increased, which placed Google Gmail's market share at risk.

Information Security Engineer Chris Evans investigated the reports and has responded on the Google Online Security Blog, saying "Our results indicate no evidence of a Gmail vulnerability. With help from affected users, we determined that the cause was a phishing scheme, a common method used by malicious actors to trick people into sharing their sensitive information. Attackers sent customized e-mails encouraging web domain owners to visit fraudulent websites such as "google-hosts.com" that they set up purely to harvest usernames and passwords."

Chris Evans then continues "Once attackers gained the user credentials, they were free to modify the affected accounts as they desired. In this case, the attacker set up mail filters specifically designed to forward messages from web domain providers."

He ends the response by re-assuring Gmail account holders that Google is constantly workings towards enhancing Gmail security. "We recognize how many people depend on Gmail, and we strive to make it as secure as possible. At this time, we'd like to thank the wider security community for working with us to achieve this goal."

Do You Like This Post? You can support our authors by providing a link to this post. Stumble It, Digg It, or bookmark this page using any of the available social bookmarking sites.