Two prominent lawmakers were among the targets of Vietnamese government agents trying to utilize hacking spyware, The Washington Post reported.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and chair of its subcommittee on the Middle East, were trying to be persuaded to visit websites designed to install a hacking software known as Predator, the Post reported.
Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., also were targeted.
The targeting came as Vietnamese and American diplomats discussed a major cooperation agreement intended to counter growing Chinese influence in Asia.
The software could have exposed Biden administration and U.S. lawmakers' views on China and the region.
The goal was to plant spyware on lawmakers' phones, the newspaper reported.
There's no evidence the hacking succeeded.
American policy experts and U.S. journalists — including Asia experts at Washington think tanks and CNN reporters — also were targeted, according to forensic examination of links posted to social platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and documents uncovered by a group of news outlets.
Amnesty International uncovered the extent of the hacking attempts and shared its findings with the Post and 14 international media outlets.
A U.S. official said 50 U.S. officials serving abroad were known to have been targeted previously with commercial spyware.
The Predator surveillance program can turn on the microphones and cameras of cellphones, retrieve files and read private messages, even when they're encrypted.
"As a Predator customer is clearly in the process of learning in a painful way, exploiting across Twitter is a terrible idea," said researcher John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, which agreed with Amnesty's findings, the Post reported. "The fact that would even happen proves Predator is still going to reckless operators."
The Commerce Department requires U.S. businesses to seek a license before doing business with European company Intellexa and a related firm, Cytrox, which are part of an evolving network that distributes Predator.
"Through all the evidence and documents we have seen we believe that Predator was sold from Intellexa through several intermediaries to the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security," Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty's Security Lab, told the Post.
Vietnam has been implicated in other hacking campaigns and has used commercial spyware programs previously, the Post reported.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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