The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China sent an e-mail Monday to its members warning that reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing said their Gmail accounts had been broken into, with their e-mails surreptitiously forwarded to unfamiliar accounts.
Although the warning did not name the organisations, one of the accounts belonged to an Associated Press journalist. John Daniszewski, senior managing editor for international news at the news co-operative in New York, deplored the breach and said the AP will be investigating to determine if any vital information was compromised. The foreign correspondents' club asked its members to be vigilant in protecting their e-mail accounts and computers from attack.
Google's announcement Tuesday that it might quit the huge Chinese market shocked the international business community and cheered many free-speech advocates. Google said a sophisticated attack in December from China targeted the Mountain View, California-based company's infrastructure and at least 20 other major companies from the Internet, financial services, technology, media and chemical industries.
Google said only two e-mail accounts were infiltrated in the attacks, with basic information such as subject lines and the dates that the individual accounts were created accessed. In its investigation, Google said it found that dozens of accounts of human rights advocates in China, the US and Europe were routinely accessed by third parties, not due to a security breach at Google, but through viruses and spy software secretly placed on the users' computers..