M.T, an accountant for a business in Tan Binh district in HCMC, said received a message via Facebook from a close friend who asked to remit VND20 million to his bank account and promised to pay him back after several days.
M.T immediately transferred VND10 million into the account given by the friend. She only realized that she was cheated after contacting the close friend by phone and asked about the borrowed amount.
BKAV, a well-known network security firm in Vietnam, estimates that computer viruses caused the damages worth VND8.7 trillion in Vietnam in 2015, which means that every Vietnamese computer user lost VND1.253 million.
According to Vo Thi Trung Trinh from the HCMC Information & Communication Department, in the first 11 months of this year, 627,355 incidents of scanning for system vulnerabilities were discovered and 72,833 attacks were recorded.
More than 1 million malicious codes were spread throughout local authorities’ networks.
Signs of being attacked were discovered on 30 IP addresses, while there were more than 1 million access requests at serious security breaches. The attackers were mostly from China, the US, Taiwan, India and South Korea.
In many cases, the victims of the attacks could not respond quickly in emergency, and thus suffered heavily.
Experts said that while the number of cyberattacks and phishing cases was on the rise, the number of emergency response teams remains modest.
Nguyen Trong Duong, director of VNCERT (Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team), said VNCERT was working with Japanese NTT EAST and partners on building CSIRT (computer security incident response teams).
VNCERT is also working with the world’s leading technology groups to disseminate network security solutions.
Nguyen Huu Nguyen from VNCERT said that CSIRTs would rescue victims in incidents, enhance training, and improve security quality. Teams will share experiences in dealing with incidents and building solutions to prevent further incidents.
VNCERT is planning to apply the Japanese model to Vietnam’s rescue teams.
Nguyen said VNCERT would help cities, provinces and businesses build CSIRT and encourage businesses to build their own CSIRT to protect their networks.
A report from VNCERT shows that 31,585 network safety incidents were recorded in 2015, while 1,451,997 Vietnam’s IP addresses were in Botnet network.
In the first six months of 2016, VNCERT discovered 8,758 phishing cases, three times higher than the same period last year; 77,160 deface cases (8 times higher); and 41.712 malware attacks (5 times higher).
Keshav Dhakad from Microsoft said Hanoi faced the highest risks because it is Vietnam’s financial center.
