The Department of Network Security was officially opened in Ha Noi on Thursday to keep an eye on Viet Nam’s internet traffic.
The Minister of Public Affairs, Tran Dai Quang, congratulated on the
recent achievements of the department and highlighted its important task
of ensuring the security and safety of the information on the internet.
In order to do that, Quang said, the department should “focus on
comprehensively improving the standards of network security officials
and officers”.
“The Department has to strengthen the international cooperation and
actively coordinate with security and law enforcement forces in other
countries to mutually develop and organise rehearsals on defence plans
against internet attacks”, Quang said.
Higher risks
According to the Ha Noi-based Security Daily, a member of the Viet
Nam Information Security Association, the number of attacks at
Vietnamese websites is on the rise, doubling from about 2,250 in 2011 to
3,520 in the first seven months of 2014.
“Hackers mainly aim at the Government’s websites to steal information
or the money from commercial and payment transaction websites”, said
the Security Daily leader Tran Quang Chien.
The most serious latest incident was in May with about 1,000
Vietnamese website under attack. Most of the hackers were identified as
coming from China.
“Reasons lie in the underestimation of security programming for the
websites as well as the late update of fixes for security
vulnerabilities. The lack of security personnel is also another
problem,” Chien said.
Stricter regulations
Regarding internet security, the Ministry of Information and
Communications has issued a circular regulating the management of
information on web portals and social networks.
Apart from detecting and preventing illegal access and attacks,
social networks should be able to wipe out violated contents under
orders from the government and be equipped with an information filter
mechanism.
The Government will be able to identify social networks’ users as the
networks will be linked to the electronic database of the citizens’
identification cards and the national system of personal social number.
All the social networks and web portals since October 10 must store
at least two years of their information activities and the same time
span for the information of the users’ accounts, log-ins, log-outs and
IP addresses on social networks. The circular also asked that all
contents on the web portals should be saved for at least 90 days since
their posting time.
VNS/VNN