Did Google Images get hacked by Energetic Bear (Crouching Yeti) or Dragonfly ?

Oddly the news about the trouble with Google Images that seemed to be all over the internet did not reach Belgian newspapers. Rather bizarre since those newspapers do tend to report on less interesting things like Sophie Ferrara, a woman living in Maryland (USA), being the oldest Facebook-user or a rapper in Kansas City (Missouri, USA) doing his thing on the music of Mozart’s Turkish March.

However, Google Images did produce some weird results yesterday, though it did not produce them everywhere nor for everybody: images of some car crash appeared to people searching Google Images for, for example, puppies. We said “some car crash” because our knowledge of Ukranian or Russian is not good enough to know if the car crash did or did not occur in Russia, as is commonly accepted. The original image however does seem to come from a Ukranian newssite (Karpatnews), which posted an article on the crash in 2012. People who read Ukranian or Russian better than we do are invited to let us know if the article speaks about a Russian accident or a Ukranian one. And while they are at it: tell us if names are being mentioned in the article.

Now, the problem has been resolved yesterday – though some people claim to still experience problems, which might be due to not clearing their browser cache or not removing their DNS cache -, but was Google Images hacked or not ?

Well … Google doesn’t comment on that. A spokesperson said it was an “internal issue”, no more no less. But we, for some reason, haven’t forgotten about the Russian group of hackers known as Energetic Bear or Dragonfly. This group has been active since at least 2011 and is, according to people at Symantec, working a standard week, operating from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in an eastern European time zone, which seems – even apart from their apparent resources, size and organization – to suggest government involvement. Knowing that Google has been victim of other hackers before, remember Operation Aurora of the Elderwood Project at the end of 2009, we for sure wouldn’t be surprised if the “Russian car accident”-incident proves to be the work of hackers in the end …

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