Vietnam - Google’s Malware Accusations ‘Groundless’

The most popular search engine giant 'Google' recently claimed that Vietnamese computer users were being monitored and blogs carrying content of political dispute were hacked. However, Vietnam denied Google's claims. According to the government of Vietnam, there are no proofs that a malware has attacked computer users in the country.

Notably, Google earlier said that the malware had infected computers of those users who downloaded software in Vietnamese language, and potentially other genuine software, which were modified to contaminate the systems.

McAfee, a top Internet security firm, asserted that the miscreants behind Vietnamese attacks might have been politically instigated and had allegiance to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam government.

According to Neeta Mehta (working with the security team of Google), innumerous users who downloaded the Vietnamese language software may be affected by software, which spied on people and hijacked systems to interrupt websites, as per the news published by Business Week on April 5, 2010.

Responding to these charges, Nguyen Phuong Nga, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokeswoman, said that these opinions were groundless, as per the news published by International Business Times on April 6, 2010. The Spokeswoman further added that there were set regulations in the country against viruses, malware, and for ascertaining secrecy and security of the content that affect computers.

Meanwhile, Google argues that the modification was done on some of its software to the extent that when installed, they permitted the modifier to scan the traffic of the user using the browser.

Explaining this, the security experts said that a localized edition of some software of Google, most probably Google Chrome was hijacked, engineered back and modified. The systems were flipped in the botnet by either that or by malware as localized Vietnamese editions of antivirus.

Whatever the case may be, the experts added that the browsing history of user who used the software was sniffed or redirected by the hackers, or a denial of service attack was launched on the Vietnamese version of few social networking sites of Google, YouTube and BlogSpot.

Related article: Vietnam – Nearly 4,000 New Computer Viruses Detected in October 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 4/14/2010