This photo taken on April 20, 2022, shows Vietnamese cybersecurity expert Ngo Minh Hieu during an interview in Ho Chi Minh City. (Photo: AFP)
At the height of his career, Vietnamese hacker Ngo Minh Hieu made a fortune stealing the personal data of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Now he has been recruited by his own authoritarian government to hunt, he says, the kind of cybercriminal he once used to be.
After serving seven years in United States prisons for stealing some 200 million Americans’ personal details, Hieu was sent back to Vietnam, which imposes some of the world’s strictest curbs on online freedom.
Hieu says he has since turned his back on his criminal past.
“I fell to the bottom, now I am trying to climb up again,”…
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