Fergie's Tech Blog

Stanford Student Caught in Google Cyber Attack

Mike Swift writes on The Mercury News:

When Tenzin Seldon, a 20-year-old sophomore at Stanford, logged onto her Gmail account from New York over winter break, she may have helped Google understand the widespread penetration of its network by unidentified hackers in China.

Unknown to Seldon, a regional coordinator of Students for a Free Tibet, at the same moment she was reading her e-mail in Queens, someone in China was logged into her account as well. Top Google officials, including chief legal officer David Drummond, later told Seldon that the suspicious situation alerted them that she was one of the human rights activists whose electronic mail was routinely being spied upon by someone in China.

"That the long arm of Chinese security could reach all the way to my home here at Stanford is something I never would have suspected," said Seldon, the first activist targeted in the cyberattack to be identified. "It's very disturbing when your Gmail account, which is as personal as it gets, can be hacked into and breached."

posted by Fergie @ 1/14/2010 07:36:00 PM