Vietnam tried to hack phones of US officials

Vietnamese government agents tried to plant spyware on the phones of members of Congress, American policy experts, and US journalists this year in a campaign that underscores the rapid proliferation of state-of-the-art hacking tools, according to forensic examination of links posted to Twitter and documents uncovered by a consortium of news outlets that includes The Washington Post.

Targeted were two of the most influential foreign policy voices on Capitol Hill: Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Representative Michael McCaul of Texas and Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and chair of its subcommittee on the Middle East. Also targeted were Asia experts at Washington think tanks and journalists from CNN, including Jim Sciutto, the outlet’s chief national security analyst, and two Asia-based reporters.

The targeting came as Vietnamese and American diplomats were negotiating a major cooperation agreement intended to counter growing Chinese influence in the region, when Vietnamese diplomats would have been particularly interested in Washington’s views on China and issues in Asia. President Biden signed the agreement in September during a visit to Vietnam.

The State Department did not respond to a question about whether it had raised the spyware issue with the Vietnamese government, but it said in a statement that the agreement would give the United States a forum for such a discussion.

The spies used the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, to try to induce the politicians and others to visit websites designed to install a hacking software known as Predator, according to the probe.

Like its better-known competitor Pegasus, Predator is a powerful and hard to detect surveillance program that can turn on the microphones and cameras, retrieve all files, and read private messages.