Vulcanbot is a

Trojan Trojan or Trojans may refer to: * Of or from the ancient city of Troy * Trojan language, the language of the historical Trojans Arts and entertainment Music * '' Les Troyens'' ('The Trojans'), an opera by Berlioz, premiered part 1863, part 18 ...

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more Internet bot, bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send Spamming, sp ...

predominantly spread in

Vietnam Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and depende ...

, apparently with political motives. It is thought to have started spreading in late 2009. The botnet began to spread after the website of the Vietnamese Professionals Society (vps.org) was hacked and the legitimate Vietnamese keyboard driver

VPSKeys VPSKeys is a freeware Input method, input method editor developed and distributed by the Vietnamese Professionals Society (VPS). One of the first input method editors for Vietnamese, it allows users to add diacritic, accent marks to Vietnamese text ...

hosted on the site was replaced with a backdoored version.

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

posted on its blog that it believed the botnet thus created was used predominantly to

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

blogger A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

s critical of the

bauxite Bauxite () is a sedimentary rock with a relatively high aluminium content. It is the world's main source of aluminium and gallium. Bauxite consists mostly of the aluminium minerals gibbsite (), boehmite (γ-AlO(OH)), and diaspore (α-AlO(OH) ...

mining in Vietnam, thus making it a politically motivated attack.

McAfee McAfee Corp. ( ), formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987 to 1997 and 2004 to 2014, Network Associates Inc. from 1997 to 2004, and Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017, is an American proprietary software company focused on online ...

compared it to

Operation Aurora Operation Aurora was a series of cyber attacks performed by advanced persistent threats such as the Elderwood Group based in Beijing, China, with associations with the People's Liberation Army. First disclosed publicly by Google (one of the vic ...

, which was also active in 2009, but found it to be unrelated. Approximately 15,000 computers were infected. Since the government of Vietnam was also seeking to suppress criticism in 2010, it was suggested that it was government-backed.

References

{{Botnets Botnets Crime in Vietnam