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Ask HN: Google warned me that a state organized hacking group targeted me
Has anyone of you guys gotten that message?
I'm still not sure why they targeted me nor how? I'm neither famous nor a journalist or blogger or scientist or something like that.
Nonetheless,what can I do to find out how they tried it? Or if they broke in or if my network is comprised?
And what can I do to prevent in future? Beside 2fa.
- buschkowitz 9y agoThis in itself sounds like a phishing attack. Is the mail authentic?
- Bombthecat 9y agoNot a mail.you get that message when logging in to Google. I first thought that too.and tried another browser ( got that message in Vivaldi first,than tried IE) Same result. Here are some old articles about that: https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/15054954/google-reassures-users-government-backed-hackers https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/15054954/google-reassures-u... http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-you-shouldnt-flip-out-over-government-backed-hacker-alerts/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-you-shouldnt-f...
- buschkowitz 9y agoYea, it does look legit after reading the articles you posted. I am not a hacker per se, but I guess uncovering what a gov hacker did in your account is highly difficult. In terms of safety, use a password manager that creates and stores hard-to-crack passwords for you. I am pretty happy with Dashlane, 1password has a good reputation, too.
- zaphirplane 9y agoWhat ! Don’t use a password manager and turn on 2 factor Authentication
- amingilani 9y agoAbsolutely use a password manager, and a strong passphrase for the master password [1] Why would you say not? I'm not trying to be rude or anything. Let's have a discussion, and if I can convince you to do use one, I'd have made one more person safer. [1] I made this for a dead simple way to make passphrases: https://amingilani.github.io/password-maker/ https://amingilani.github.io/password-maker/
- herbst 9y agoNot OP but open for a chance. Last time I checked the popular password managers saved the passwords in one way or another. Which personally simply sounds like a bad idea to begin with. Even if in theorie they are safe. Even the slight chance that a single failure could lead to all my passwords getting in the wrong hands at once just is to scary.
- Angostura 9y agoI must admit, I use Apple’s Keychain, I wouldn’t trust a third party app.
- chopin 9y agoDo you have citations for this? AFAIK state of the art is to put the password through some password stretching algorithm (like PKBDF) and to encrypt the database with that. No need to store the password. I think NaCL offers out-of-the-box support for this. EDITED to add: I am using Password Safe which is recommended by Bruce Schneier. What you describe would be an absolute noob mistake. He would be pretty embarrassed if you were right.
- icebraining 9y agoI think herbst is saying that password managers store the passwords being managed, not the master password used to encrypt the DB.
- mercer 9y ago
- DyslexicAtheist 9y agointeresting. does anyone know how ProtonMail handles such situations and whether they alert their users?
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoThis is when you know you've "made it", when state intel is trying to get to you :-) Seriously now, even though you're not famous or a jounalist you might have some type of valuable access in your life? Or maybe it's just a false positive from google. Or maybe you weren't being especially targetted, and instead your e-mail ended up in some list of valuable e-mails (rightly or wrongly).
- meganibla 9y agoYeah but they’re not going to let you know if the NSA or the CIA targets you. So the message can be read more like: a non-allied state actor has targeted your email and we are notifying you to show how good we are. Please note we will not reveal when you are targeted by an allied state intelligence. Privacy is relative, mostly an illusion. Thank you for your cooperation.
- Bombthecat 9y agoJeah,my thought were along that line to. It's not America. More likely is Russia,China,Japan, Germany or God knows...
- Bombthecat 9y agoAnother user here noted that Google also tells you if you were just in a circle. But they didn't tell me...
- anotheryou 9y agoI got it too years ago. It said it might also be my circle of contacts being attacked. So it might not be you in specific.
- Bombthecat 9y agoMine didn't.. That's bad I guess.
- supergirl 9y agohow do they know it’s a state organized group?
- badrabbit 9y agoAdvanced Persistent Threat (APT aka Nation state) actors are tracked using known indicators of compromise. These indicators can include infrastructure identifiers such as domain names and ip addresses that maybe used in a phishing url or post-compromise for command-and-control or to download other malware. Other indicators can include malware sample hashes or actor-specific detection rules (Example: YARA,Snort or Netwitness rules). These indicators are typically not public. Some can be accessed if you pay the right sum of money and undergo vetting,still,some are kept private within the relevat security firms or organizations. As you can imagine,Google has their hands in many pies including security research and threat intelligence collection(Everyone loves their VirusTotal intelligence product). They can scan email metadata for any of these indicators as they see fit. Generally speaking,some indicators are of such high quality, they can be used to detect well crafted spear phishing by a nation state actor. But most are good only to detect untargeted attacks or targeted attacks that include a large number of targets. Hope that answered your question.
- supergirl 9y agoit doesn’t. i was asking how do they know in this case
- badrabbit 9y agoThe indicators I mentioned are associated with a nation state actor because the attacks in which they were identified were attributed to a nation state. In other words,the selective targeting and sophistication match the interests of a nation state. Geo-political intelligence analysts and sometimes field officers (aka spies) also play a role. For example,if a specific journalist was attacked while working on an article critical of a specific country and at least one indicator was traced to an a real human associated with that country's spy agency the a confident attribution can be made. The term "nation state" does sound a bit fancy but it is different from "country" in that many nation states do not act on behalf of their people or to protect the interests of their conuntry. If you use "country" that would include the people of the country while "nation state" simply means the organization running the country. Plus you have situations like taiwan,hong kong and chechnya where those nations are effectively their own nation state but they are under the control of a different country. Here is a good reference attribution of APT3 (Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS)): https://threatpost.com/apt3-linked-to-chinese-ministry-of-state-security/125750/ https://threatpost.com/apt3-linked-to-chinese-ministry-of-st...
- huntsman 9y agoMy team at Google is responsible for identifying the users we give these warnings to. Here's what I wrote last year to provide a bit more context: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/03/reassuring-our-users-about-government.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/03/reassuring-our-users... The most important point is that this indicates signs of targeting not compromise. Also,like all systems there are false positives especially for security researchers and the similar types but we hope it is a useful indicator to reassess your security posture.
- pimlottc 9y agoThanks for the extra context. One thing I didn’t see addressed that I’m curious about is how does Google distinguish a “government-backed” attack vs your normal everyday hackers? Is it a function of the specific methods used, the depth and breadth of resources deployed, source ip ranges, or what?
- huntsman 9y agoIt's a range of factors. Basically this warning means that what we detected ties in some way to wider activity that looks government backed. There's some border cases, but in practice the targeted campaigns of governments look very different in both technique, volume and targeting to say a widespread cybercrime phishing campaign. It's not a perfect science, but we believe its worth calling out separately the activity that does fall into this bucket.
- Bombthecat 9y agoBut Google would tell me if they were successful,right? Also: should I tell my coworkers what happened?
- huntsman 9y agoIf we detected your account was compromised Google would have given you a different notification at that time and forced you to change your password.
- rabboRubble 9y agoPerhaps you aren't of interest, but you are in the address book of somebody of interest, or in the address book once/twice/thrice removed of somebody of interest.
- jacksmith21006 9y agoIronic Google warns you of this while we have Apple moving their iCloud to GCBD in China where GCBD is managed by the China Gov. Then they also moved the keys also to China. Then on top removed the VPN apps from the app store. Google Gmail was getting hacked by China gov so they warned and ultimately left China. Even Amnesty International has opened a campaign on Apple and their disregard for privacy. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy-betrayal-for-chinese-icloud-users/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy... Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud ...