Cybersecurity firm Bkav confirms 200 users’ data leaked

Vietnamese internet users Tuesday found the data has been published on a data trading website Sunday by a user called 'seasalt123'.

The user said he or she got the data from Breport.vn, a website Bkav uses to receive reports about its products and services.

The website states it was under maintenance at the time of publishing.

Bkav has confirmed the leakage.

"We have accidentally exposed the email addresses and possibly phone numbers of around 200 customers," it stated.

The website was supposed to be deployed from a server belonging to Amazon’s cloud, but the data got leaked due to a Bkav's mistake, it said.

"This does not affect other official services that are being deployed from our internal infrastructure," the company said and apologized to its customers.

This was the second time this year that Bkav, a leading cybersecurity company in Vietnam that also produces smartphones and wireless earbuds, faces scrutiny in cybersecurity.

The first time was in August when a hacker called 'chunxong' offered to sell Bkav’s source codes at the price of $250,000.

The hacker even posted a video showing how he hacked Bkav’s system even though the company claimed the codes were "leaked by a formal employee".

In the first nine months this year, 16 major data leakages were reported in Vietnam with a total of nearly 100,000 online accounts leaked, according to a report by Viettel Cyber Security.