Hillary Clinton hopes the Chinese government's explanations for the attack on Gmail

The U.S. Secretary of State today branded as "very serious"allegations of Google onthe cyber-mails from U.S. officials launched from China.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now branded as "very serious" allegations of Google on the cyber-mails from U.S. officials apparently launched from China.

"Google has reported these allegations, leading to very serious concerns and issues. We hope that the Chinese government to offer an explanation," Clinton said in a statement.

"The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is essential to society and modern economy," the secretary of state.

The software giant Google yesterday announced the dismantling of a "plan to steal passwords of hundreds of emails from gmail to senior U.S. officials" and other Asian countries.

In its corporate blog, Google said that "detected and disrupted the campaign, conducted through phishing" and apparently launched from China's Jinan city.

The California computer company added that later, "said the victims, said their accounts and notified the relevant government authorities."

The cyber affected in addition to senior U.S. officials, "a Chinese political activists, officials from various Asian countries (notably South Korea), military personnel and journalists."

Clinton announced that he will "give a speech about the importance of Internet freedom in XXI century next week, and then offer more comments on this topic when the facts become clearer."

The Chinese government, meanwhile, rejected accusations today of U.S. software giant. "The accusation is unacceptable," said the spokesman on duty at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hong Lei, who said there were "ulterior motives" to throw against China.

"Cyber ​​attacks are an international problem that China is also a victim. The allegations of the alleged attacks are totally groundless and has ulterior motives," Hong said at a news conference.

In January 2010, Google publicly announced that its operations in China had been the target of cyber attacks in order to access the correspondence of Chinese dissidents, in addition to stealing from the company code and trade secrets.

This created tensions between the U.S. complaint and China, and led even to temporarily close their Google search engine in China to refer all queries to the portal free of Hong Kong, which was not subject to censorship.

Tensions eased in the middle of last year, when the Chinese government renewed its license to Google and the search stopped automatically derive Chinese Internet portal to Hong Kong.