Found this via Matt Cutts’ blog. This is a big deal:
1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted…
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.htm
[…] by Google dated January 12th 2010, Gmail is now defaulting to https. This was posted shortly after notification of their being attacked, and some speculate this change was made to protect Gmail users from having their mail intercepted […]