On June 12, VOV Online Newspaper (member of The Voice of Vietnam) published two articles related to Nguyen Phuong Hang, wife of Huynh Uy Dung – billionaire owner of Dai Nam Tourist-Cultural-Historical Zone. They are titled ‘Phuong Hang and her social-deviance livestreams: Time for Strict Punishment’ and ‘Immoral to Freely Insult Anyone Online’.
However, when seeing these articles, certain people had extreme reactions by creating clone accounts to attack VOV Online Newspaper platform. Particularly, on June 13, they carried out Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks to this platform; attacked VOV’s Fanpage on Facebook; sent letters, messages and made calls to insult interviewees mentioned in the articles.
After the incident, the Ministry of Information and Communications directed Viettel and VNPT urgently handle attack and in the afternoon of the same day, VOV Online Newspaper was successfully recovered.
More seriously, on the Facebook page of N.H.K (born in 1987 and living in Ho Chi Minh City) – the IT specialist helping Phuong Hang locate anyone who is against her online, there is a post to instruct people how to attack VOV Online Newspaper, with an encouragement for people to actually carry out attacks. This content shows signals of law violation.
At the moment, A05 is handling the case.
