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Google Sends State-Sponsored Hack Warnings To Journalists and Professors (ibtimes.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares an IBTimes report: Numerous journalists and professors are taking to social media to report that they have received an alarming message regarding state-sponsored hacking when accessing their Gmail or other sites that use their Google account. Journalists who received the warning include Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, Politico's Julia Ioffe, GQ's special correspondent Keith Olbermann, Vox's Ezra Klein, Yahoo News' Garance Franke-Ruta, and one of President Barack Obama's former speechwriters, Jon Lovett. The warning says, "Google may have detected government-backed attackers trying to steal your password." These warnings are being sent by Google since 2012 but Twitter has erupted with a flurry of people in the media and academic community receiving this in the past 24 hours.
It's more reasonable than you think.
Do you think that Google has a completely ignorant security team? That they don't have access to internal experts in global routing and traffic analysis? They wouldn't have an internal databases of known hacking sources, methodologies and heuristics and means of tracking command and control?
They may not have a signed invoice for the person paying for the attacks, but they likely can make really, really informed estimates.
Krugman's value isn't the accuracy of his economic predictions, its his public status as the economist to the liberal elite. He's a major opinion leader whose academic status gives him significant public credibility. And they may not even care about that primarily, what if you hacked his account and found evidence of collusion with Democratic politicians? Even if it wasn't active political collision but only non-partisan advice being solicited and given, how hard would that be to turn into click-bait propaganda?
Even if access only gave you the ability to predict his columns, it may be enough evidence to create timely counter-propaganda via a competing analysis, discrediting his sources or other means. This could be used against the Democrats generally or against candidates specifically to influence internal debate or power struggles inside a party.