VietNamNet Bridge - The reports on internet security released recently by state agencies and security organizations all pointed out that Vietnam is a ‘hot spot’ around the globe for security problems.

 

 

A report of the Ministry of Information and Communication’s Information Security Department showed that DDoS (distributed denial of service) has caused a headache for organizations in Vietnam. In August 2015 alone, 907 servers and 2,088 websites suffered from DDoS attacks. 

Meanwhile, according to VNCERT, the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team, in the first quarter of 2015 alone, 365,644 IP addresses in Vietnam, belonging to botnets, were found involved in DDoS attacks toward many targets in the world, including the IPs belonging to state agencies.

A report of the Southern Information Security Sub-association released on the eighth Vietnam Information Security Day on November 19, 2015 showed that only 6.6 percent of 200 surveyed businesses and organizations are equipped with the systems to prevent DDos, lower than 16.06 percent in 2014.

Other preventive measures have also not been applied: only 10 percent of businesses have IDS/IPS (intrusion detection system), 17 percent have web filters, 19.4 percent have anti-spam system and 7.1 percent have SIEM (Security Information and Event Management).

Meanwhile, the report of FireEye and Singtel released on November 19 on intentional cyber attacks in South East Asia showed that in the first half of 2015, the organizations in the region which FireEye kept close watch faced the risk of becoming the victims of cyberattacks higher by 45 percent than the average level around the globe. Meanwhile, the figure was 7 percent only for the six months before.

Twenty nine watched organizations were the ‘aim points’ in intentional cyberattacks in the first half of the year.

FireEye believes that the software called CANNONFODDER might be the tool that hackers use most regularly to collect political and economic intelligence.

The security organization in April released a report, pointing out that a group of hacker named APT 30 could be the culprit behind a series of cyberattacks to government organizations, press agencies and enterprises in India and South East Asia in the last 10 years. 

According to FireEye, ATP 30 began deploying its attacks in 2005, targeting Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Nepal, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia, using software named Lecna.

FireEye is now keeping a close watch over APT.NineBlog, a group of hackers discovered first in 2013, which is believed to target South East Asian governments in 2015.

The Bach Khoa Antivirus Center (BKAV) in October 2015 reported that holes exist in 40 percent of websites in Vietnam.

Trieu Tran Duc from CMC InfoSec, while noting that Vietnamese ignore preventive measures to protect their information, commented that Vietnamese ‘accidentally lend a hand to cyber crimes’.

Thanh Mai