San Francisco, Jun 2 (AFP) A cyber spying campaign originating in China had targeted Gmail accounts of senior US officials, military personnel, journalists and Chinese political activists, Google has said.

"We recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing," Google security team engineering director Eric Grosse said in a blog post yesterday.

"The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples' forwarding and delegation settings," he said.

The campaign appeared to originate in Jinan, China, Grosse said, and targeted the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users of Google's free Web-based email service.

Those affected included senior US government officials, Chinese political activists, military personnel, journalists and officials in several Asian countries, predominately South Korea, he said.