Hundreds of Vietnamese Websites Hacked After Island Dispute With China

The recent dispute between China and Vietnam over the Spratly/Nansha Islands has apparently spilled over online, as a security firm says that more than 200 Vietnamese websites have been defaced with Chinese flags and hacker messages in Chinese. Meanwhile the online version of Vietnam’s Tuoi Tre Newspaper claims that the number of websites hacked is more than 1500.

One of these websites including the page of the Foreign Ministry’s Translation Center, which is still down, but we managed to get a screenshot using a cached version of the site (see below).

The English message says “We are Chinese Honker!” Now this appears to be a Google translation of ‘hongke‘ from Chinese Red Hacker (‘hongke’) Union. They use ‘hongke’ instead of heike (the Chinese word for hacker) substituting a patriotic red for the black character.

Honker: nationality unknown

Of course I could be wrong, they could actually mean honker (see right). That would be way more awesome…

Underneath this in Chinese it says that “the Nansha Islands belong to China! In the past. Now. And in the future.”

Of course, this is just the latest in a rash of hacker-related news worldwide, not the least of which is the Sony breach last month. Perhaps China is smart to rally its Cyber Blue Team to defend itself amid all this online craziness.

Personally I’d be far more at ease if China just kept to its old solution of playing nautical chicken whenever island disputes come about.

Lead photo: chinese.rfi.fr