Google’s Gmail hit in phishing scheme

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Google Inc. said today that its Gmail e-mail service has been attacked in an industrywide phishing scheme in which hackers obtained user names and passwords to gather personal information such as credit card and bank account numbers.

‘This was not a Gmail security breach,’ said Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs. ‘As soon as we became aware of the issue, we reset the passwords on the small number of affected accounts.’

He did not say how many e-mail accounts were compromised. He advised customers to enter their e-mail credentials only to web addresses starting with https://www.google.com/accounts and to examine carefully certificate warnings.

In all, about 30,000 people using Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other e-mail service providers have been victims of recent phishing schemes, according to BBC News.

-- Melissa Rohlin