Why the emphasis on state sponsored attacks? (I am aware of stuxnet/flame/sanger's book) If google knows I am being targeted by a non-state actor are they choosing not to notify me? Are we going back to a cold war mentality where the only credible attacks are state sponsored?
State sponsored attacks are often more serious than non-state attacks. Most malware attempts to exploit victims for the financial gain of the authors--which is bad, but something individuals recover from. If someone is targeted for surveillance by a totalitarian state, it's possible that their life is in danger.
Gmail already warns users when Google suspect their accounts are compromised. All this is doing is changing a small subset of those warnings into a less-easily-ignorable warning for those users that may be targeted by state actors.
Presumably if it's a serious attack by a non-state actor, Google's lawyers are on the job in the relevant state(s) getting police involved, for whatever that's worth.
In the state actor case, there's little or nothing they can do to make it stop happening, hence the special warning.
It's also a high-profile jab at the unnamed state actors, which is nice.
I assure you that the grandparent is misinformed, the chance of google's lawyers and/or the police being involved if some individual is sending you targeted malware (aka spear phishing) is essentially 0%.
AFAIK you do get warned if Google thinks your account has been compromised by normal pishers and what not. This is just a more detailed message that I'm sure most people will never see.
State-sponsored attackers have access to much better resources. I do wonder how they determine who gets these things; do they look for keywords in your email, or do they monitor where login attempts are happening, or do they look at phishing messages that arrive at your account?
State-sponsored attackers also likely choose different targets. I'm not afraid to be a victim of such attack, but if I worked eg. as a diplomat, or as a defence contractor, or any government agency, I might actually be worried. There were some examples of attacks lately that targeted US government officials. So I guess Google shows this warning primarily to people who might be probable targets of state-sponsored attacks in the first place.
