After WhatsApp row, Google warned 500 Indians of 'govt-backed' hacking

Nearly a month after WhatsApp made its now controversial revelations about an Israeli software being used to snoop on Indian citizens, Google said on Tuesday that about 500 users from India were among 12,000 people informed about being targeted by ‘government-backed attackers’ between July and September this year.

The affected users were spread across 149 countries, and the number was similar to (up or down 10 per cent) the number of warnings sent in the same period of 2018 and 2017, Shane Huntley from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said in a blogpost.

“Over 90 per cent of these users were targeted via ‘credential phishing emails’... these are usually attempts to obtain the target’s password or other account credentials to hijack their account,” he said.

As an example, Huntley explains how a phishing attempt works. An attacker sends an authentic-looking email, which can be made to look like it was sent from Google, with a security alert. Read Complete Article