Vice Minister of Information and Communications, Nguyen Thanh Hung, said on Wednesday that cybersecurity has always been an intense concern in Viet Nam, which will only increase in order to protect legitimate properties and interests against theft and sabotage.

Hung spoke at the Cybersecurity Vietnam 2016 workshop in Hà Nội on developing response teams and cybersecurity solutions. The workshop was held jointly by the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Center (VNCERT), Microsoft Vietnam and NTT EAST (Japan).

Hung said Việt Nam now has a national CERT center with a network of over 120 computer security response teams CSIRTS across the country. "This is no small number. But this CSIRT workforce has just been formed in cities and provinces, while at companies and businesses, CSIRT teams have not been operating effectively," said Hung.

Nguyen Trong Duong, VNCERT Director, told seminar participants that Việt Nam is seeing more and more advanced persistent threats (APTs), targeting government offices and critical infrastructures, such as the recent attack on Vietnam Airlines.

Websites of various agencies, organizations and individuals in Viet Nam are targets of numerous threats, he said. Many of the attacks were on the increase. Attacks launched against IoT devices including cameras, smart TVs and others, and use of social media to disperse malwares, award scams, fake identity and information theft, are increasing.

VNCERT said it documented 31,585 incidents in 2015 alone (including phishing, defacing and malwares), and 1,451,997 instances of Vietnamese IPs spotted on Botnet, a network of private computers infected with malicious software.

In all, various instances of phishing, malware attacks and other hacking-related attacks, targeting hundreds of Government sites among others, surged 159.6%, compared to 2014. In the first half of 2016 alone, these incidents grew 4.4 times compared to 2015, including 8,758 phishing events, 77,160 deface events and 41,712 malware incident

Michael Montoya, a Microsoft Security Executive, shared with participants useful solutions to keep valuable business information safe: "As the digital ecosystem is rapidly exanding, we want to leverage the power of intelligence and big data approaches to advance comprehensive cybersecurity capacity in a Protect, Detect and Respond approach, and support cybersecurity efforts in Viet Nam, particularly through state-of-the-art products like Windows 10, Office 365, Microsoft reliable public cloud and various initiatives, including the Microsoft Government Security Program (GSP).”

“Businesses should take an ‘assumed-breach’ posture and invest in proactive approaches that leverage intelligence and adaptive technology platforms," Montoya said. "In addition, an IDC study also indicates a positive relationship between unlicensed software and security breaches – the higher the piracy rate, the more malware incidents are found on computers. As such, using licensed software is an effective way to prevent malware threats for businesses.”

At the workshop VNCERT also presented its program for developing a network of response teams across Viet Nam, providing useful updates for businesses to prepare and create their own CERT teams to respond to cybersecurity threats. — VNS