Chicago (IL) - Yesterday morning, Google's e-mail service, Gmail, was smacked with an outage lasting several hours, and then later in the evening the company was hit with a phishing scam making its way around Google Talk, the chat protocol provided within the Gmail Web client.





The company issued an open apology via its Gmail blog for the outage, and then updated the blog to state that the website, ViddyHo.com, discovered to be the source of the phishing scam, was added to the company's blacklist, and any users currently transmitting the link have been blocked.



Individuals targeted by the scam received a chat message which appeared to look as though they were sent from a friend's user name. The message contained a link, which asked individuals for their Google log-in and passwords. Any individual providing this information granted the phishers open access to their account, which was used to send the exact same or similar message to individuals on their contact list, thus perpetuating the scam.



Individuals whose accounts were compromised are urged to change their passwords. At this point, no suspicious activity has been reported on targeted accounts, just a perpetuation of the message.

Google claims the Gmail outage and later phishing scam outbreak outbreak were unrelated events.