The latest report by Microsoft shows that Vietnam is among the top five countries for malware risk.
Athena HCMC, a well-known network security center, reported that on February 4, 2017, groups of foreign hackers, believed to be from Algeria, attacked the electronic information portal systems of several state agencies in Ba Ria – Vung Tau.
At the moment when the websites were attacked, visitors could only see the words ‘Hacked By Team System Dz’.
Nguoi Lao Dong on February 7 quoted Le Thanh Nhan, a security expert from Athena HCMC, as saying that the websites exposed vulnerabilities, giving opportunities to hackers to attack and insert their images.
If hackers can insert images, they will be able to insert files with malicious codes and viruses to steal information from websites and computer networks. If so, users will get infected with viruses when accessing the networks.
The Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team (VNCERT) in 2016 discovered 134,375 cyber attack incidents under three forms – phishing, malware and deface attacks, a four-time increase compared with 2015.
These included 10,057 phishing cases, 46,664 malware and 77,654 deface attack cases.
The center noted a high number of attacks to the websites with ‘.gov.vn’ domain name with one phishing, 17 defacing and 63 malware infections.
Experts said that hackers only need to attack one website in a network of websites in one locality to be able to easily attack other websites and cause serious damage.
Hackers now tend to quietly attack certain websites to install malware which ‘ambushes’ computer networks and carries out attacks when there are favorable conditions.
A report released by BKAV, the best known network security center in Vietnam, showed that in 2016, computer viruses caused serious damage worth VND10.4 trillion, much higher than the VND8.7 trillion in 2015.
The cyberattack to Vietnam Airlines, the nation’s flag air carrier in July 2016, according to experts, should be seen as a strong warning about APT (advanced persistent threat).
BKAV has warned that many websites of state management agencies have been infected with malware, and that many APT attacks will be deployed in 2017.
According to Kaspersky Vietnam, Vietnam, the Philippines and India were three countries which had the highest numbers of users with computer incidents in Asia Pacific in 2016 (64, 58 and 55 percent, respectively).
Microsoft, in its latest report about network security SIR Volume 21, named the five top countries at risk of getting infected with malware. Two are from SE Asia – Vietnam and Indonesia.
