Is Google facing Hacking Threat?

The big G seems to have landed under trouble.My newspaper daily, Times Of India reported that Picasa, Gmail, Blogger and the search engine itself are vulnerable.Indian Computer Emergency Response team has warned users against a virus called "googbot"

It has been observed that a mass-mailing worm named Googbot is circulating in the wild. It propagates by exploiting software vulnerabilities.

The worm has its own SMTP engine to send mass e-mails. It harvests the e-mail addresses from the infected system and sends malicious e-mails to the collected addresses. The e-mail body contains a malicious link which entice the users to click upon using social engineering technique.

The e-mail contains the following :

Subject : (any of the following)

• Someone has sent you a Private Message!
• You have just recieved a NEW message!
• You have (1) NEW messages!

Body : (any of the following)

• You have just recieved a new Google Message!
• You can view your message here: http://www.google.com/gmsgid=4289472
• Note: If you do not already have Google Message Viewer installed, you will be prompted to install it.

Sounds interesting doesn't it? But they have a valid reason .I use Gmail,Blogger and Adsense daily and if these services are hacked, I'm gone!
And to add Google AdSense website has gone down at around 10:30am GMT today.Neither the AdSense blog nor the Official Google Blog has any detail of it

Thanks Amit for a great post on How to backup your blogger blog which has helped me to deal with this situation

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