Tran Tien Hung (L) and Do Quang Thanh

Viettel has confirmed that Tran Tien Hung and Do Quang Thanh ranked 88th and 97th in the list.

Tran Tien Hung, born in 1992, discovered three flaws in the Windows operating system, including one which helps hackers hijack personal computers and collect users’ information.

The flaw affects both Windows 7 and Windows 10, the two most popular operating systems in the world with billions of installed devices. According to Microsoft, this is a dangerous flaw which is just second to a ‘critical’ flaw on the firm’s 4-level scale.

Do Quang Thanh, born in 1996, discovered an error in Windows’ graphics interface related to all the images displayed on users’ screens. The flaw may create a door for hackers to easily intrude into users’ ‘personal worlds’.

The flaw discovered by Thanh is a dangerous error in the ‘heart of the operating system’. Discovering the vulnerability, hackers can attack and take control of the entire computer operating system.

The task assigned to Hung and Thanh at Viettel is to discover the flaws on the system and give warnings. 

To create the list, Microsoft evaluated submissions from July 1 last year to June 30 this year.

The third Vietnamese recognized by Microsoft is Minh Tran, in the 56th position. He was found in the list Microsoft released in 2017.

Minh Tran was an information technology major student at the High School for the Gifted in Natural Sciences under Hanoi National University. After finishing high school, he went to the Hanoi University of Science & Technology. In 2009-2011, he was a postgraduate at North Caroline State University.

His profile on LinkedIn shows that Minh Tran was an intern and then engineer for Palo Alto Networks, a US-based multi-national network security firm.

After three years of working for Palo Alto Networks, Minh left for Fortinet, the world’s fourth largest network security firm in terms of revenue, to work as senior researcher.

Minh Tran received Fortinet’s research award in 2017, the disciplinary award for Dean’s List students, and the first prize at Capture the Flag Hacking Contest.

The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) has emphasized that network safety is considered an important factor to develop e-government, digital government and digital content industry, and that Vietnam needs to become a power in network security.

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