While all eyes are on China, Google efforts to monitor especially politically motivated digital attacks on privacy, the company said it detected a wide-spread attack to spy on Vietnamese users. Google believes that the attacks were designed to “squelch the opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam.”

The company said that targeted malware potentially infected “tens of thousands of users who downloaded Vietnamese keyboard language software and possibly other legitimate software that was altered to infect users.” Apparently, the attack was much less sophisticated that what we have seen come out of China, but they had a clear purpose: “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.”

“Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country,“ Google’s Neel Mehta wrote.

Patches and updates for anti-virus software packages to counter this attack is already available for some vendors, but Google said that users need to be much more aware of this developing trend: “At a larger scale, we feel the international community needs to take cybersecurity seriously to help keep free opinion flowing,” Mehta wrote.

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