Trojan incident

In March 2010, Google^[2] and McAfee^[3] announced on their security blogs that they believe that hackers compromised the VPS website and replaced the program with a trojan. The trojan, which McAfee has code-named W32/VulcanBot, creates a botnet that could be used to launch distributed denial of service attacks on websites critical of the Vietnamese government's plan to mine bauxite in the country's Central Highlands.^[4] McAfee suspects that the authors of the trojan have ties to the Vietnamese government.^[3] However, Nguyễn Tử Quảng of Bách Khoa Internet Security (Bkis) called McAfee's accusation "somewhat premature".^[5] The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement calling Google's and McAfee's comments "groundless".^[6]
VPS discovered a breach on their website on January 22, 2010, and restored the non-infected software then, but did not publicize it widely because they did not realize the serious nature of the matter.^[7]