Google has said that it identified cyber-attacks aimed at silencing opposition to a Vietnamese government-led bauxite mining project involving a major Chinese firm and said they were similar to those at the heart of the company’s friction with Beijing.
The computer security firm McAfee, which detected the malware, went a step further, saying its creators “may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.
Malware infected “potentially tens of thousands of users” who downloaded what they thought was Vietnamese keyboard software, and possibly other software, Neel Mehta of Google’s security team said in a post on Tuesday on the firm’s online security blog.
“These infected machines have been used both to spy on their owners as well as participate in distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks against blogs containing messages of political dissent,” Mehta wrote. “Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country.”
In other developments, Google said on Tuesday that a deeper look at trouble with results at its Chinese-language search engine indicated the cause was “The Great Firewall of China” erected by censors there.
The US Internet giant had initially thought that recent changes to its search software had misled China censors into thinking queries were for Radio Free Asia.
Google backed off that conclusion after it realized that it had upgraded its search parameters about a week before results stopped showing up for many queries at its Chinese-language engine.
“So whatever happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the great firewall,” a Google spokesman said. “However, interestingly our search traffic in China is now back to normal — even though we have not made any changes at our end.”
China’s notoriously sophisticated Internet censorship is referred to as “The Great Firewall.”
Google said it will continue to monitor what is going on, but for the time being “this issue seems to be resolved.”
Google upgraded search code parameters worldwide to include a “gs_rfai” string of characters as part of a modification intended to improve query results, the company said.
Engineers at the firm initially suspected problems with China search results were caused by censorship software in that country mistaking the “rfa” characters as referring to Radio Free Asia (RFA), the US-funded broadcaster transmitted across Asia that is routinely jammed by Chinese authorities.
RFA president Libby Liu said in response to their unintended association with the Google dispute that the development was “a stark reminder to the world of China’s repressive control of the Internet and free speech for its citizens.”
“It’s time for China to stop exerting draconian control of its cyberspace, and allow accurate and objective information to flow freely within its society,” Liu said in a statement released out of Washington.
Google also said it has yet to pinpoint the cause for its mobile Internet service being partially blocked in China.
The US Internet giant reported on Monday that its mobile Internet service in China was partially blocked, but it was unknown whether the trouble was related to its stand-off with Beijing over censorship.
Google mobile includes search, map, news and other services for smartphones and other Internet-enabled handsets.
Sensitivity to problems with Google offerings in China heightened since the company last week said it would no longer bow to government censors in Beijing by filtering its search results and effectively shut down its Chinese search engine, rerouting mainland users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
New Zealand is open to expanding its frigate fleet beyond its current two vessels, with New Zealand Minister of Defence Chris Penk saying “no options are off the table” as the government weighs buying new warships from Japan or the UK. The government yesterday said it is looking to replace its two aging Anzac-class frigates, which were both commissioned almost 30 years ago. The UK’s Type 31 and Japan’s Mogami-class warships are the options under consideration. Speaking in an interview, Penk said there is potential to increase the number of frigates the nation purchases. “We need a certain amount of capability as a
The Philippine Coast Guard yesterday said it deployed aircraft to issue radio warnings to a Chinese research ship in a disputed area of the South China Sea “swarming” with vessels from Beijing’s so-called maritime militia. The research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 33 (向陽紅33), which is capable of supporting submersible craft, was operating near a reef in the contested Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島), which Taiwan also claims, the Philippine Coast Guard said. The Chinese ship was deploying a service boat toward the Spratly’s Iroquois Reef on Wednesday when it was spotted by a coast guard plane, “confirming ongoing unauthorized [marine scientific research]
RSS