Members of Hacker Vietnam, a forum with computer tips and warnings, and the CMC Information Security company said several new software and services of Baidu have spyware secretly installed in local computers, Tuoi Tre reported Sunday.
They said Baidu’s music player software TTPlayer contains an adware, or an illegal advertisement software which is automatically installed into the users’ computers when they download the music player. The adware will change the computers’ home page for advertisement purposes.
The download also infects the computers with an application called hao123.1.0.0.1097.exe that functions as a trojan downloader, downloading virus codes anytime the computers are connected to the Internet.
“Many data from the computers have been sent to a server in China,” said a post on Hacker Vietnam.
HiPlayer, a software required for watching movies online on Baidu’s ahphim.com gives computers the same application.
Tran Thanh Hung, a local computer user, told Tuoi Tre that he recently had to re-install his computer system as he could not remove some virus codes infected with such downloads.
“My computer just slowed down and then could not run at all,” Hung said.
He said the virus codes disabled his anti-virus Kaspersky software.
Security technicians said Vietnamese computers are at high risks of attacks if caution is not exercised in downloading software.
Their computers can lose data and become zombies used for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, they said.
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Baidu started operating in Vietnam six months ago, bringing over two major products from China, which are the online directory hao123.com.vn and the Q&A page zhidao.baidu.com.vn.
On July 1, it launched a social network called “Baidu tra da quan” (Baidu the iced tea shop) in Vietnam, without official permission.
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