Insiders May Have Helped Hack Google

Spying is an old profession that for centuries used no special technology. Electronics only became useful in the 20th century, with the creation of the tape recorder and other devices that made gathering secret information easier.It turns out the cyber-spying may still rely largely on humans in many cases. Sources say that the cyber attack on Google (GOOG) may have been aided by Google employees in China. "Google is investigating whether one or more employees may have helped facilitate a cyber-attack that the U.S. search giant said it was a victim of in mid-December," according toReuters.

A little help from an insider means that getting by the Google software security would not have been nearly so difficult.

The news certainly adds a new wrinkle to cyber-espionage. It means that employees, who are either bribed or have conflicting loyalties to their employers, may pose the single most dangerous threat to the security of servers that hold data for companies ranging from search engines to government sites to e-mail operations handling the communications of hundreds of millions of people.

The cyber-security for most companies and governments is said to be highly sophisticated and that may be true, but an "inside job" can take a great deal of the security advantage away. If Google's security was breached with the help of its own employees, the game of protecting online data has changed.