The alarming figures

Nguyen Viet
The, Head of the Informatics Department from the Ministry of Public Security released
a lot of figures to show the vulnerability of information in Vietnam at a
workshop held several days ago on network security. The domain with suffix
“.vn” now ranks the third in the list of the domains facing the risk of being
attacked (about 15,000 websites).

VietNamNet
online newspaper is a typical example. Since November 22, 2010, it has suffered
a prolonged and continuous attack which has destroyed the database and archives
stored for the last ten years.

A lot of
domestic websites have holes that place them at high risk. Meanwhile, the
majority of big Vietnamese websites have security holes that put them at risk of
being hijacked. The problem is that 90 percent of Vietnamese websites have been
built up on ASP.NET technology and use IIS 6.0 service. This is the biggest
hole which still has not been remedied.

2010 was a
year in which 1000 websites suffered attacks because of holes existing both on
the websites and on the systems’ servers. The list of websites attacked includes
websites belonging to financial institutions, banks, and securities companies, all
of which need to be strictly protected.

The
stressed that the alarm level should be raised since hackers have become more
professional and they do not leave many traces. Especially, crimes always
target online payment services and organize hacking campaigns when enterprises
organize sales promotion programs.

Statistics
released by security organizations showed that about 60 million computers in Vietnam
were infected with viruses. This means that 160,000 computers got infected with
viruses a day, an alarming figure. Conficker remains the type of virus which
has been spreading most rapidly among personal computers. About 6.5 million of
computers were infected with this kind of virus in 2010.

According
to Dr Phuong Minh Nam,
Deputy Head of the Informatics Department under the Ministry of Public
Security, Vietnam
has fallen into the list of top 10 countries which face the highest risk of
information vulnerability. Vietnam
is now only behind China, Russia, India
and the US
in terms of risk level, and users and Internet service providers can be
attacked at any time.

Awareness is the key

The from
the Ministry of Public Security believes that Vietnamese businesses and
individuals now have a “habit” of using unlicensed software products.
Therefore, holes may appear which hackers can exploit to attack. Especially,
computer users download software with no clear origins online.

According
to the ministry, in 2010, though 47 percent of businesses and administrative agencies
said they increased the investment on information security (the figure was 37
percent in 2009), the investments prove to be ineffective enough. Two thirds of
enterprises said they do not know how to react to computer attacks. More than
50 percent of organizations do not have reaction procedures.

Stefan
Tanase, a senior expert from Kaspersky, said that the problem in information
security is the awareness of enterprises’ and agencies’ staffs about information
protection, and the “gatekeeper” is the hole through which hackers attack enterprises.

The Prime
Minister has issued the national program on information security for the period
of 2010-2020. This is the first official document which legalizes the issue.

The
Ministry of Information and Communication has also released a message about an
information security day, calling on individuals, enterprises and organizations
to join forces for information security in Vietnam.

Tuyet Ngan