VietNamNet Bridge – The Hacker Vietnam Association has got a taste of its own medicine with hackers launching two DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on its forum this month.

DDoS attempts to prevent legitimate users from gaining access to the resources of a computer.

Typically it floods a site with communications requests to the extent it cannot handle any further requests.

On June 5 and 12 the transmission line to HAV’s server came under tens of thousands of hits, the association which groups ethical hackers said.

Most of the botnets involved in the attacks originated in China, HAV said.

A botnet is a collection of infected computers or bots that are taken over and used to perform malicious tasks or functions.

Zone-H, the provider of statistics of websites attacked globally, said between June 1 and 13 hackers raided 423 websites with “.vn” domain names, 12 of them being “gov.vn”.

The Ho Chi Minh City-based Back Khoa Internetwork Security (BKIS) reported that 250 websites, including 51 with “gov.vn” domain names, were attacked in the two first weeks of this month.

The number is double that of the same period last year, it said.

Vu Quoc Khanh, director of the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team, has called administrators of websites and e-information gates to re-examine their security systems and plug loopholes that make them vulnerable to hacking.

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre