A Vietnamese team won the first place at the 2015 Cyber SEA Games in Jakarta, Indonesia on Thursday.

The competition focused on cyber security for competitors under 30 years old from 14 teams in ASEAN region.

The team earned 2005 points, 500 points higher than Thailand, the second winner of the game.

The competition included forensics, reverse engineering and computer network defence.

Each ASEAN country appointed one to two teams, which was formed by three members each.

All participants won national-level contests in their own countries.

Nguyen Khac Lich, deputy director of the Viet Nam Computer Emergency Response Team (VNCert), said that VNCert co-organised with big information and technology (IT) companies to seek individuals who have won at annual contests of information security and elite students at the IT departments of universities.

The achieved result has shown that investing in people is the right direction to help serve the development of the Vietnamese information security sector in particular and the technological sector and other sectors in general.

Members of the winning team all have deep and comprehensive knowledge in the field of cyber security, said Dang Hai Son, who was responsible to lead the team to Indonesia.

Son also added that after becoming the winner of the Cyber SEA Games in the region, the Vietnamese team and the runner-up from Thailand will be sponsored to Japan to join the global security contest (SECCON) in January, 2016.

Security programme

The central city of Da Nang will invest VND884 million (US$42,000) to develop a cyber security programme later this year.

The firewall hardware with a high-speed attack mitigation engine will apply package filtering to protect computer users and the city's information system.

According to the city's information and communications department, the Centre of Integrated Circuits (CENTIC) has been assigned to build up the first locally-made cyber security system at Quang Trung Software Park.

The centre, which was established last year, has helped boost the information technology (IT) industry, trained hi-tech human resources for IC design and research, and provided embedded systems for domestic and foreign enterprises.

The local IT sector has developed rapidly and now has 5,000 employees in 600 businesses in its centralised IT parks.

In 2013, the city launched the IT infrastructure system, which includes a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), wireless internet, data centre and a centre for training and research on IT applications, providing 1,196 online administration procedures.

The city plans to complete e-Government by 2015 and Smart city by 2020.

In October, the website of the city's Education and Training department was hacked, and it needed one week to recover operations.

VNS