By Charles Mgbolu

Google Nigeria has broken the silence and announced that Nigerian users of the Google mail accounts have nothing to worry about following the disturbing hacks that took place in several Asian countries where several hundreds of Google email accounts were broken into by unidentified persons.

Google had in a blog statements earlier in the month told the world that indeed a hacker had obtained access to hundreds of Gmail accounts, including those of senior U.S. government officials, military personnel, Chinese political activists and journalists.

There had been no immediate panic from users in Nigeria following the hacks but Vanguard Hitech had probed for possible security breaches on G mail accounts owned by Nigerians thus provoking these comments that called for calm from the company.

According to Julie Taylor; Google’s press officer, “It is important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected by these account hijackings. It was not also as a result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online.” She continued “Google detected and has disrupted this campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails. We have notified victims and secured their accounts. In addition, we have notified relevant government authorities.”

Google said the hacker had attempted to go on “a campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegating settings.”

According to the company, “ Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems, we were able to detect and stop the campaign which appears to originate from Jinan, China, and which affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.”