While many were pleased that Google stood up to China over the hacking of its email accounts, questions were raised over why the search engine outfit felt this was so important.

After all, while it was terrible that a handful of human rights activists were hacked, it was hardly worth closing the Chinese office over. According to new information it appears that the hack was more dangerous than was first announced. The December cyberattack hit the company's password system that millions of people worldwide use to access almost all of the company's Web services.

According to the New York Times the closely-guarded program is considered a crown jewel at Google, enabling users and employees to sign in with their password only once to operate various services including e-mail and business applications. Code-named Gaia the program was described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago.

While the intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and Google quickly started to bolster security based on the fears that the intruders may find weaknesses that Google might not know about. This explains why Google claimed that the hack was "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google."

However the hack it described was hardly sophisticated.