Vietnamese websites were hit by more than 6,500 cyber security attacks – all either deface, malware or phishing attacks – in the first eight months of 2018.

According to a report by the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team (VNCERT), approximately 100,000 IP addresses in Vietnam visit or access virus-infected websites daily and security vulnerability is becoming bigger every year.

The VNCERT said the frequency of attacks to portals and websites in Vietnam has rose. The largest number of attacks were recorded on the domain name “.vn”, accounting for 44.07 percent, followed by “.com.vn” (36.58 percent) and “.edu.vn” (9.45 percent). Governmental websites registered with a “.gov.vn” domain were struck by 4.72 percent of the total attacks.

The most common type of attack was attack to harvest data, making up 70 percent of the total.

Securelist.com named Vietnam among top 10 countries hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the last quarter of 2017 and among the top 10 nations with the highest botnet-assisted DDoS attacks with more than 637,000 computers infected with the virus.

In July, the Bkav Technology Group discovered that more than 560,000 computers in Vietnam have been monitored by malware called BrowserSpy that can track users’ actions and steal their personal information, such as bank account details and email and Facebook passwords.

VNCERT estimated last year, Vietnam was hit by 13,382 cyber attacks, including 6,400 malware; 4,377 deface; and 2,605 phishing attacks. 

On September 5, the team hosted the ASEAN CERTs Incident Drill – ACID 2018 in Hanoi to improve the capacity of ten ASEAN member states, Australia, China, India, Japan and the Republic of Korea in dealing with cyber-crimes caused by coin mining viruses.–VNA