Vietnamese blogger arrested, blog becomes booby-trapped with malware

The dissenter’s blog is set up to find and track like-minded individuals.

A Vietnamese blogger, Truong Duy Nhat, was arrested at his home for his blog posts that called for social reform, according to a report Monday from Reporters Without Borders. After his arrest, Nhat’s blog was temporarily disabled. An unknown party then set it up again as a trap, downloading malware on any PC that tries to access it.

Nhat’s blog, entitled “Another Point of View,” was his follow-up to reporting positions at two state-controlled newspapers, Quang Nam Da Nang Police Newspaper and Great Solidarity Newspaper. Nhat has been writing at “Another Point of View” since 2010, criticizing the country’s Communist government.

The most recent post at Nhat’s blog was titled “The General Secretary and Prime Minister must stand down.” In a post from October 2012, Nhat attested that his blog was neither propagandistic nor reactionary, according to Reporters Without Borders.

As of Wednesday, Nhat’s blog was accessible again. However, visiting the site reportedly results in an attempt to download malware to the viewer’s computer. It is unclear whether Nhat set up the blog that way or if others gained access and booby-trapped it to keep would-be readers away (or else load their PCs up with stealth-monitoring malware).

Nhat’s arrest was followed by that of Djiboutian Maydaneh Abdallah Okieh, a “website technician” who posted photos of police breaking up a protest on his Facebook page. Okieh was sentenced to 45 days in prison and ordered to pay 200,000 Djibouti francs ($1,113) in fines and 2 million francs ($11,131) in damages.

 Source: Ars Technica

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