VietNamNet Bridge – The name “Sinh Tu Lenh” has become famous in Vietnam after the Ministry of Public Security stated that the culprit who attacked BKAV’s website and VietNamNet online newspaper, is a group of hackers called “Sinh Tu Lenh.”

A lot of information system attacks occurred in the first months of 2012 alone. BKAV, a well-known network security firm, Unikey and the website of a student named Quynh Anh, an attendant of the “Vietnam’s got talents” competition, one after another became the aiming points of the hackers. Meanwhile, the leading Vietnamese online newspaper VietNamNet bore a lot of attacks in 2011, which led to the fact that the websites was inaccessible for many days.

Only on March 22, 2012, after many months of investigation, Colonel Tran Van Hoa from C50 Agency of the Ministry of Public Security, stated at a security workshop in Hanoi that the hacker to BKAV’s website and VietNamNet newspaper was “Sinh Tu Lenh” (Life and Death Command).

In fact, the name “Sinh Tu Lenh” was a hot topic among the network security officers in 2010 and 2011 already, when the group hijacked a lot of famous websites and blogs in Vietnam. After the hacker successfully attacked a website, he would leave a tag “Sinh Tu Lenh” on the website’s interface. The tag once was the threat to webmasters and blogs’ owners.

Since 2010, Sinh Tu Lenh has been carrying out a lot of attacks to the most well known websites and blogs in Vietnam, including VietNamNet newspaper, BKAV’s website, Unikey and blogs, especially the blog of musician To Hai, and “made an enemy” of Hvaonline.net, a hackers’ forum in Vietnam.

The activities of the group of hackers have caught the special attention from the public. It once was known as the people who tried to eliminate “left handed” websites (left-handed means the website which publish reactionary news, while right handed refer to Vietnamese newspapers). However, after a period of operation, Sinh Tu Lenh began carrying out DDoS attacks to a lot of famous websites in Vietnam to steal personal information.

There are contradictory pieces of news about Sinh Tu Lenh. In July 2011, some local newspapers, quoting their sources, affirmed that Sinh Tu Lenh is a man named Tuan, born in 1978 in Quang Nam province, using the nickname tohoangvu. Tuan is now living in HCM City under the mask of a designer.

Prior to that, in the last months of 2010, the information about Sinh Tu Lenh once again arisen from Vietland forum.

“Internet’s dwellers” made a wild guess that Sinh Tu Lenh is a group of Vietnamese students in the US. All of them are very young and following the training courses to obtain doctorate. The leader of the group is a man born in Hai Phong City and graduated from the Hanoi University of Technology.

However, the author of the entry later published an article correcting the information.

Some bloggers wrote on their blogs that Sinh Tu Lenh is a group of hackers trained by BKAV and operated under the management of C50 Agency, which targeted left handed websites. However, no reliable information has been found to prove the conclusion.

Meanwhile, TQN, a member of Hvaonline.net, the hackers’ forum, provided a noteworthy thing that there is a man named Tuan, born in 1978 and he has the nickname tohoangvu. However, the evidences are not enough to conclude if Tuan is a member of Sinh Tu Lenh or just a victim.

TQN has found out after analyzing a “.exe” file that the group of hackers includes two or three teams that write malware, not only one man. The hackers’ forum has discovered some interesting information that a man with the nickname Wu Yu Zhen seems to have close relation with Sinh Tu Lenh.

However, it is very difficult to find out the real name and nationality of the person, who can use both Vietnamese and Chinese fluently, post Chinese music, calligraphy and Hong Kong’s actresses’ images like a real Chinese person.

Binh Minh