At midnight, Duc Tuan, an SEO expert, was awakened by an important client, who said his website suddenly fell down to a lower position. After a rapid check, Tuan discovered that the website of his client’s rival jumped into higher positions thanks to links from websites of state agencies with domain names of ‘.gov.vn’ or ‘.edu.vn’.

He also found that hackers had turned hundreds of ‘.gov.vn’ or ‘.edu.vn’ websites into pages advertising for gambling webs, which are believed to be sourced from China.

Ngo Tuan Anh, CEO of SCS, said the fact that some state agencies’ websites have been inserted with ad links is called ‘backlink’, which means that hackers exploit the vulnerabilities of the websites to insert their ad links via the flaws. The links cannot be seen by the eye, but can be detected by some systems and tools like Google.

As such, when a website address is attached to a reputable website of a state agency, the website will be positioned high. This helps heighten the search rankings of malicious and gambling websites.

Anh went on to say that this is not a new phenomenon, but it has been seen on the websites of many state agencies. This is essentially a neo-deface cyberattack which shows that the website protection by state agencies remains problematic.

Anh said that since one company can work for many clients (provinces, districts and localities), the same source code is used for the clients, and the vulnerabilities are nearly the same. This allows hackers to exploit vulnerabilities to carry out mass attacks, and insert gambling ad links. 

Hackers insert gambling links into websites because Google prioritizes websites with ‘.gov.vn’ domain name.

According to the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) under the Ministry of Information and Communications, many websites of state agencies are exploited by hackers in order to upload a high number of files with toxic content.

The files appear during the search process on Google and redirect users to other websites when they access the links. This will become dangerous and serious if the hackers post and spread malicious content, distorting VIetnamese sovereignty, the Party and State’s policies.

Deface attacks on a website change the appearance and content of a website or a web page. Recently, hackers attacked state agencies’ websites to create backlinks to websites that want to jump into higher positions in Google’s search results, or to place ads for ‘black’ and ‘dirty’ webs.

Trong Dat