Chairman of the Board of Directors of VNDIRECT sent a letter to customers

Early afternoon of March 29, the website homepage of VNDIRECT Securities Company posted a letter from Ms. Pham Minh Huong - Chairman of VNDIRECT - sent to all customers. This is the first time after 5 days of the system being down, the Chairman of VNDIRECT has shared with customers.

In the letter, the Chairman of VNDIRECT apologized for the cyber attack that disrupted and stopped customers' transactions in recent days, and expressed his sincere thanks for the patience, companionship and understanding of all investors and customers.

Ms. Pham Minh Huong's letter wrote: On March 24, international hackers attacked the encryption of VNDIRECT's technology system. Although we always invest heavily in building a safe and secure information technology system, we must admit that VNDIRECT's team, although very skilled, still lacks experience in preventing and stopping sophisticated cyber attacks on an international scale like this. We were surprised in the early days and had to seek support from leading Vietnamese technology experts and companies, as well as relevant government agencies.

Through this major incident, we have fully realized that, despite developing rapidly like any business in the industry in Vietnam, in addition to focusing on developing products and features to serve customers, we cannot neglect the most important task of protecting the system against increasingly sophisticated attacks by digital criminals. Currently, we know that information security is a very serious problem on a global scale, especially for financial and banking organizations. In particular, currently, malware of criminal organizations is constantly upgraded, always the latest versions, extremely complex encryption, capable of causing serious impacts on technology systems.

Although the entire system and data have been restored, the information security review process to ensure safe connection conditions takes a lot of time. I understand that every day of delay makes investors impatient and affects business operations, so the entire technology team, along with partners and managers, are working day and night, every second and every minute, to try to bring the system back to operation. This attack is an intrusion into the virtualization system and encryption keys, but cannot penetrate the database and customer data. During the system recovery process, we also spent a lot of time to ensure the integrity of customer information and assets.

We still have some steps to go through. During the process, we also increased security, patched vulnerabilities and grasped key issues to protect security in the future. This incident is also an opportunity for VNDIRECT to train awareness, improve the quality of the team; improve and upgrade its security and safety system; and be ready to respond to similar incidents in the future. The authorities are closely monitoring and ensuring the system is absolutely safe when reconnecting to the two exchanges.

Updated as of today, we have successfully completed the transaction flow on the simulated environment at 9:00 p.m. on March 28, 2024. VNDIRECT is completing the procedures with the information security management agency to be able to officially connect with the two stock exchanges HOSE and HNX, expected today March 29, 2024.

"We are also studying appropriate support policies and will share them with investors as soon as possible, but the immediate priority is to restore the system and prevent future risks, and reopen to serve investors. VNDIRECT is expected to reopen securities trading activities on Monday next week (April 1). We would like to sincerely thank our investors for their patience, companionship and trust, the unconditional support of our partners and the tireless, day and night fighting of our technology experts so that we can overcome such a large-scale attack! We look forward to receiving your sympathy and companionship! Sincerely thank you," said Ms. Pham Minh Huong - Chairman of VNDIRECT.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/chu-tich-hoi-dong-quan-tri-vndirect-gui-tam-thu-cho-khach-hang-185240329151915687.htm