4,770 cyberattacks hit Vietnam in Q1 2019

8,319 cyberattacks struck the country last year, according to the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Center (VNCERT) under the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Nguyen Trong Duong, director of VNCERT, said that the two most common infringements in Q1 2019 were violations of information security policies (40 percent) and unauthorized information collection (39 percent).

Other violations included denial of service (8 percent), privilege escalation attack (7 percent) and the spread and attack of malicious codes (6 percent).

There were 124 cases of onsite malicious code attacks, 2,245 interface breaches, and more than 1,000 websites attacked by phishing codes, Duong said at a conference on Thursday.

VNCERT also warned of several risks including AI-based malicious code attacks as the main trend in 2019. The center said that attacks against e-commerce, financial and banking systems for the purpose of stealing personal information and data from users might take place more often this year.

Data the information ministry released at the Vietnam Security Summit 2019 in mid April shows that last year, none of the 90 ministries and municipal/provincial departments in the country had the highest cybersafety rating of grade A.

Just 17 percent had grade B rating. The majority, 70 percent, had grade C rating, while the remaining 13 percent had grade D. None had the lowest security rating of grade E.

Half these agencies do not have a unit in charge of cybersecurity, nor have they engaged a professional firm to do so. Therefore, they don’t know how to react when there is a cyberattack, speakers said at the conference.

Fifty two percent of the agencies admitted they haven’t set the correct priority for cybersafety, and 49 percent said they don’t have an adequate cybersecurity budget.