Although Google has gone out with a lot of information about "Operation Aurora, the attack that hit the company and several others last fall, the many details remain secret. This applies not least, what the attackers actually had access to.
Now, writes New York Times that among the attackers should have been joined, the Gaia, the system uses Google's services to check whether a user is already logged on another Google service (Single Sign-On). This tells an unnamed source that should have been directly involved in Google's investigation of the attack.
Gaia will not save password or other user information. It specifies the source in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Google should have done a lot of measures to improve security after the attack, but it is not certain that this is enough. By having access to Gaia, the attackers could easily uncover potential unknown vulnerabilities in this system, according to security experts such as New York Times has been in contact with.
The newspaper believes that this disclosure will provide a flare in the debate about the safety of network cloud solutions as Google, where personal information about millions of users stored in a central location. A truly successful attacks on such systems can cause catastrophic consequences.
The source of the New York Times should also have revealed that the attack against Google started when someone sent an instant message to a Google employee in China via Microsoft Live Messenger service. The message should have contained a link to a website containing malware. This code should have given the attackers access to the user's machine and thus also to the computers to a central group of software developers at the Google headquarters in California.
