Attacks on the Press in 2010 - Committee to Protect Journalists

Introductionthe severely restricted nation, were being blocked not just from Burmeseaudiences but from international viewership as well.In Vietnam, more than a quarter of the relatively youthful populationwas online in 2010, according to ITU data. The country’s communistgovernment has made Internet control one of its priorities, and thesophistication of surveillance and attacks on Vietnamese online media nowrivals that of any nation in the world, including China. Websites coveringnews of the Vietnamese government’s bauxite mining policies—a controversialissue because of potential ecological damage and the involvementof Chinese companies—were taken offline in early 2010 by DDOS attacks.The thousands of computers used in this attack were controlled by a largedomestic botnet of computers infected by a specific kind of malware.Researchers at Google and McAfee, a computer security company, uncoveredthe source of this infection. A blog post by McAfee’s CTO, GeorgeKurtz, described a Trojan concealed in the software downloaded by manyVietnamese residents to allow them to enter native text accents when usingWindows computers.In Vietnam, accent software carries adebilitating Trojan virus.In February, CPJ reported on a direct hacking attack that took down theVietnamese news site Blogosin. The site’s editor, Truong Huy San, who alsoused the name Huy Duc, soon posted a message on a newly created homepage to say that he would stop blogging to focus on personal matters. Theattack occurred on the same day as the trial and conviction of Tran KhaiThanh Thuy, a writer and editorial board member of the online magazineTo Quoc. (Thuy was sentenced to three and a half years.) The e-mailaccounts of two other bloggers, Pham Thi Hoar and Huy Duc, were hackedat the same time, Human Rights Watch reported.Can governments like Burma and Vietnam really commandeer and coordinatesuch elaborate methods of silencing online voices? It is difficult, if notimpossible, to trace the true origins of DDOS attacks, the targeted hackingof websites, and even the final destination of secretly forwarded e-mails.Just as the Internet’s decentralized and interconnected systems allowjournalists the ability to speak anonymously and preserve the anonymityof sources, they can also misdirect and shroud the location of malicious11