Spyware 'made in Vietnam'

One day at the end of the year, Ms. PHY, a Maritime University student, opened her computer and received an offline message which is a link with a domain name starting with vuonnhac. I wonder if there are friends who send songs online for me, she doesn't hesitate to click and the discomforts start from there .

At first, the pop-ups were turned on and off, offering products of low-quality rice bran. Annoyed, Mrs. Y. closed the page . and opened another window to browse the web, it was unexpected, the homepage she used to stay at google.com changed to vn-n.com.

My knowledge of computer knowledge is enough for me to immediately understand that my computer has been infected with spyware and robbery, then I have to say it in the browser homepage (homepage hijacker).

Without delay, she rushed to download the famous antispyware software Spybot Search & Destroy about computer cleaning. After nearly half an hour, dozens of spyware had been killed, Ms. Y. sighed in relief and restarted the computer, but when she turned on Internet Explorer, the vn-n.com page was still stunned. on the homepage is tantalizing.

Refusing to surrender, she continued with a variety of other anti-spyware software. But to no avail, uninvited guys continue to arrogate the language on the homepage and release all these pop-ups to other pop-under, along with them are other types of spyware and terrible resources (CPU Usage always at approximately 100%) making the computer run slowly like . reverse crawling turtles.

Finally, Ms. Y. had to come up with an extreme solution to reformat the C drive and accept it for a whole week to reinstall all the software in use. 'There is a bit of knowledge about computers, so I am always wary of the links ending in .exe or .pif because they often contain viruses, but the link is completely normal like this, who would have expected it?' , Y.

But Ms. Y. is not the only case of getting into this trouble. Youth Reporters and collaborators conducted a quick survey on more than 100 randomly selected Internet stores in Hanoi, Hai Phong and Ho Chi Minh City. The results were startling, with over 20% of computers infected with vn-n.com. Due to the narrow survey area, the data is not very accurate, but it also shows somewhat the extent of this 'spyware' infection.

Pham Quang Hung, deputy director of NMS Online Marketing Solutions, said: ' This spyware infection is mainly through sub sites with entertainment content such as music, stories, chat, and games. , sports, lottery results. When users visit one of these sites, they will silently install spyware and be changed to the browser homepage to vn-n.com '.

According to Mr. Hung, it is because of the mechanism of penetration through the popular content sites that the infection rate of vn-n.com is very high. In just the last three months, this' made-in-Vietnam 'spyware' has helped the website vn-n.com, with content that is full of links and . ads, gaining more than 20,000 ranks in the rankings. of Alexa, not at 121414, a ranking that many online newspapers have to dream about.

According to Mr. Hung, due to the 'success' of vn-n.com, many other websites have also started to use this browser hijacking method like songdong.net, the haihai website . He emphasized:' This is a very dangerous trend and is likely to thrive in the future. Because it is only popular in the Vietnamese community, these 'Vietnamese' spyware are much more invalid than foreign spyware because they are not blacklisted by spyware programs so they cannot be destroyed. with those software '.

Currently the 'made in Vietnam' spyware only stops at the browser homepage hijacking and pop-ups, but without sanctions, it will surely rise to the same level as 'colleagues' one day. 'In developed countries for the ability to steal passwords, personal information . for shady purposes.

And that is an extremely dangerous threat to our rapidly growing e-commerce.

BINH NGUYEN