The number of internet-borne cyberthreats in Vietnam in the fourth quarter of 2019 decreased by more than 50% compared to the same period in 2018, according to a report quoted by a press release.
Attacking through browsers was the chief method that cybercriminals used to spread malicious programmes, the report by Kaspersky said.
The number of detections of web threats in Vietnam in Q4 2019 decreased by about 53% from nearly 27.5 million in Q4 2018.
Data from the report also indicated that the countries with the lowest number of users attacked by web-borne threats in Q4 2019 in Southeast Asia were Singapore and Thailand, with 12.3% and 17.9%, respectively.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, Kaspersky products blocked nearly 13 million different internet-borne cyberthreats, corresponding to 25.6% of Kaspersky Security Network participants in Vietnam hit by web-borne threats.
An official at the company said that the development of cyberspace together with the fourth industrial revolution has been bringing tremendous benefits in socio-economic development. This, however, could also enable an explosion of high-level online crime.
In 2019, the Vietnamese government paid more attention to cybersecurity, and, as a result, the security landscape in Vietnam has significantly improved.
The official said that they encourage enterprises and consumers in the country to continue boosting their awareness and intelligence on real-time cyberthreats to better secure their data and assets online. They believe this new decade will bring along new technologies and new threats and the best way to deal with them is to keep defences intelligent.
To remain secure against evolving threats online, the company’s security experts advise users to carefully check links before visiting sites, enter usernames and passwords only over a secure connection, and avoid logging in to online banks and similar services via public Wi-Fi networks.
They should also be aware that URLs that begin with “https” may not always be secure, and to not trust emails from unknown senders until they can verify the authenticity of their origin.
The country has been pushing for the digital transformation of all its sectors. According to a report by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), the IT industry’s revenue recorded US$ 112 billion in 2019, a year-on-year increase of 9.1%. The sector also contributed nearly VN 54 trillion (about US$ 2.3 billion) to the state budget and created jobs for over one million workers.
The country’s telecom industry also witnessed strong growth last year, although traditional services became saturated. The revenue of the telecom sector in 2019 was VN 470 trillion (about US$ 20.2 billion), an increase of 19% compared with 2018.
ICT commodities, such as mobile phones, computers, hardware, and electronic items, continued to rank among the top ten major export products for the country. This brought the whole sector’s trade surplus to around US$ 28 billion.
The digital content industry gained a modest revenue of around US$ 850 million, of which export revenue accounted for nearly 93%. This is because Vietnam enterprises have not yet capitalised on the domestic market, which was completely dominated by large cross-border platforms such as Facebook and Google.