Vietnam has recently become the main target of a series of large-scalecyber spying activities, such as LURID, Operation Shady RAT and theByzantine Hades attacks.

This was revealed by Colonel Nguyen VanThinh, deputy head of the Department of Cyber Security under theMinistry of Public Security, at the Security World 2015 conference heldin Hanoi on March 25.

He said the ministry detected various malwares penetrating computer systems of various governmental and ministerial agencies.

Theministry also discovered that foreign hackers were launchinglarge-scale spying campaigns to attach malware, with nearly 100different samples, into email systems of the Party, and the government'soffices, Thinh said.

“They are targeted attacks that are aimedat officers of the government and the party's agencies. Based on ouranalysis, the malware with sophisticated design has been inserted intodocuments and exploits a zero-day hole," he said.

According toThinh, in 2014 alone, the ministry had discovered that nearly 6,000Vietnamese online news pages and online news portals were attacked,losing administrative rights and its contents were amended. Out of them,246 pages were of government's agencies, ending with the domain namegov.vn.

"Especially last year, after China's illegal placement ofthe Haiyang Shiyou 981 inside Vietnamese waters and its exclusiveeconomic zone, foreign hackers had attacked more than 700 local onlinepages, and more than 400 online pages on the occasion of theIndependence Day on September 2 and inserted distorted content onVietnam's sovereignty over the Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelago," Thinhsaid.

According to the Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2014, therewere 1.4 million malware attacks on the Android operating system lastyear, which was four times higher than 2013. Vietnam was ranked sixth inthe top 10 countries worldwide, based on the number of users attackedby malware.

In terms of security risks, Vietnam ranked in thefourth place globally with nearly half of users at risk of malwareinfection while using the Internet. The country was at the top positionwith about 70 percent of computer users susceptible to malware andmalicious software via USB and memory cards.

Attending theconference, Richard Staynings, Director of Cyber Security Solutions atCisco Systems, called for standard issuance to ensure privacy andinformation security in the age of the Internet of Things. He said thatthe more Internet-connected devices increased, the more security riskswe would have, and it would pose a threat to network security bothinternally and externally at various organisations.

Stayningssaid the Internet of Things had posed security challenges and therewould soon be a need for new ways to control Internet-connected devices.

ThemedStrengthening Information to Protect Privacy and Enable Trust inToday's Risk Landscape, the event was aimed at assessing informationsecurity threats to organisations and to put forward key initiativesthat would help businesses keep pace with constantly evolving threatsand security requirements in today's interconnected business ecosystem.

Theconference was organised by the Ministry of Public Security, Ministryof Information and Communications, the IT & Cyber SecurityMonitoring Centre under the Government Committee for Cipher, incollaboration with the International Data Group in Vietnam.-VNA