According to Ho Trong Dat from VNPT’s Center for Information Security, 20 years ago, hackers scored points by taking down websites, while now, they make a living by selling the data they can steal. 

"Data leakage happens everywhere, in every country, every industry, from the military to daily life, and to everyone," said Dat.

The expert cited statistics as saying that in 2021-2022, there were over 5,000 attacks, or 10 attacks a day related to data leakage in the world. The data leakage prevention solution market is forecast to grow rapidly, with total market value likely to increase by 2.5 times in the next three years.

Nguyen Xuan Nam, strategy director of Viettel Cyber Security, said of the 10 big data leakage detected by the firm in the first quarter of 2023, there was one case of selling of 300GB of source code data and customer data of a technology unit; two cases of selling and sharing information of many large universities in Vietnam with data capacity of 500MB; two cases of selling source code data of some media and retail units with 3.5 million records; one case of systematic source code and user data of a unit operating in the energy sector; and four cases of personal information leakage, with 15GB source code and 4 million records.

Noting the risk from organizations’ personnel, the expert cited research results of Stanford Research as pointing out that 88 percent of data infringement comes from users’ mistakes. 

DTEX’s 2022 report also showed that in 2020-2021, the number of risks and troubles from the inner systems increased sharply by 72 percent.

Major General Nguyen Van Giang, Deputy Director of the Department of Cybersecurity and High-Tech Crime Prevention and Control under the Ministry of Public Security, said the department has been fiercely fighting with cybercriminals and personal data buying and selling.

From early 2021 to February 2023, agencies have prosecuted five cases with a total data capacity of thousands of GB containing billions of personal information trafficked.

The latest case occurred on February 3, 2023. Ha Tinh provincial police prosecuted two men for trading personal information of 2 million people.

Giang cited four major of data stealing trends, including attacking to distribute malicious code to steal and encrypt data from users' devices and electronic media; attacking via enterprises’ supply chains; attacking administrative server systems, data servers using cloud computing platforms; and attacking to exploit security holes to hijack and steal data from large agencies and organizations.

Van Anh