VietNamNet Bridge – Security Daily’s monitoring system found that 1,039 websites were hacked in the first two weeks of September, but the hacked organizations do not seem to be concerned.
Of the 1,039 hacked websites, there were 69 websites run by education organizations with the domain name “.edu.vn” and 30 government organizations’ websites with the domain name “.gov.vn”.
“The figure that 30 government organizations’ websites were hijacked just within a short period of two weeks shows the alarming situation,” commented Tran Quang Chien from Security Daily.
Security Daily figures have been published in internet security forums and hackers’ forums, and been added to warnings from the community and findings from Zone-h, zone-hc, hack-cn systems.
With 1,039 hacked websites so far this month, September has had the highest number of websites hacked this year, followed by May with 989. August had the lowest, 208.
Also according to SecurityDaily, the hackers that conducted the attacks were mostly from China, Indonesia, Syria and Turkey, and were from Vietnam.
Hackers exploited well-known vulnerabilities and holes like SQL Injection, Local Attack, L/RFI, default configuration errors and weak passwords. They also exploited the holes that exist in out-of-date platforms.
In the last nine months, 4,767 Vietnamese websites have been hacked, which represents a twofold increase compared with 2011-2013. On average, 18 Vietnamese websites are hijacked every day. The number of hacked websites is expected to increase in the last three months of the year.
Meanwhile, according to VNCERT (Vietnam Computing Emergency Response Team), 721 Vietnamese websites have been turned into counterfeit Google, Yahoo, Apple and Paypal websites by hackers.
A report released by FPT, the largest information technology group in the country, showed that in August and September alone, about 200 websites were exploited by hackers to conduct phishing.
Bantinthitruong.net, for example, was exploited to draw internet users to counterfeit Yahoo!, while the website of VietQ turned into a counterfeit PayPal log-in website.
Nguyen Minh Duc from FPT said that hackers, assuming Yahoo!, PayPal and Google names, sent emails to users with links and suggested that they “click here to view something”. The users who believed them provided personal accounts to hackers.
The increasingly high popularity of the internet in Vietnam has led to an increasingly high number of phishing cases in the country.
A report from Kaspersky Lab, a well known security solution provider, showed that Vietnam was among 10 countries with the fastest growth rate of phishing cases, while Vietnamese are listed among the most regular phishing subject.
The report also pointed out that the main targets of the hackers are the users of Yahoo!, Facebook and Amazon services.
However, Vietnamese have been ignoring the warnings from domestic and foreign security firms.
An analyst commented that hackers still can swindle Vietnamese users with very simple methods “invented” many years ago.
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