Vietnam political blogs hacked

INTERNET giant Google says Vietnamese computer users have been spied on and political blogs hacked in attacks which a leading web security firm suspects are linked to the country's government.

The incidents recall cyber attacks in China that Google in January said had struck it and other unidentified firms in an apparent bid to hack into the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

"These infected machines have been used both to spy on their owners as well as participate in distributed denial of service attacks against blogs containing messages of political dissent," said Neel Mehta of Google's security team in the firm's Online Security Blog.

Perpetrators of the Vietnamese attacks "may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," George Kurtz, chief technology officer of California-based Internet security firm McAfee, wrote in his Security Insights Blog.
Vietnamese authorities could not immediately comment.

Mr Kurtz said McAfee had been sharing the results of its investigation with US-based Google which, in its own blog posting late Tuesday, said malicious software had infected the computers of potentially tens of thousands of users around the world.

"Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country," Mr Mehta said.

The mining project which is underway in Vietnam's Central Highlands is controversial partly because at least one Chinese company has been granted a major contract.

Opposition to the development peaked last year in a rare public outcry from a broad spectrum of society.

A website which initiated a petition against the mining displayed a notice Wednesday saying it had been hacked and suggested alternate sites which users could try if they experienced access problems.

"We've had notably two problems: hackers and the firewall. People can no longer open our site in internet cafes," said Nguyen Hue Chi, an administrator of the Bauxite Vietnam site