iPad/GMail breach?

I recently purchased an iPad in the UK and set it up to have it use my GoogleMail account. Within 24 hours, my GMail account had been hacked and used to contact scores of people on my contact list, using a list that was at least a year old. This hack attack was a rather crude attempt to scam money from my friends. This caused no end of difficulty for me and some consternation on the part of my non-technical friends and contacts, including my bank manager.

I am now trying to figure out if the breach was an iPad breach or a GMail breach.

My suspicion is that the hack attack was the result of a weakness in the iPad security.

The purpose of this post is to invite evidence or comments from others who may have had similar difficulties with the iPad/GMail combo.

 

Thanks JR. I appreciate your help.

 

I've recently received an iPhone from my uni, supposedly for academic use. Heh heh. Anyway, I do wonder about the security implementations for the iPhone/iPad etc. Apple's statements on the matter seem a bit vague but i could be looking in the wrong place i guess...

 

It is highly unlikely that either your iPad or Google was the source of your account compromise. The timing is likely coincidence and you should check computers you have used to log onto gmail for malware.

There has been, to date, no itw cases of malware targeting iOS.

 

The hacker used an obsolete contact list that still resides in my email client program on my desktop machine. During the time period of the hack, this machine was accessed remotely by me from the iPad and an iPhone using the Mocha VNC app to check recent email arriving at my desktop. The desktop had an active Mocha VNC server to create and manage the remote sessions, using a fairly weak password.

Also the iPad was used to sign on to gmail as webmail on the gmail.com web page.

The desktop machine uses anti-malware software to provide some protection, but only done weekly.

No other machines were used to activate gmail.