There are still 190 educational websites and 76 government agency websites with gambling and betting advertisements inserted.

SGGPO 06/03/2023 10:02

Compared to April 2023 statistics, the number of government agency websites infected with malicious code decreased by 50%, while the number of educational websites attacked increased by 11%.

On June 3, the Vietnam National Cyber Security Technology (NCS) said that after 1 month of warning about the phenomenon of Vietnamese educational websites with the domain name .edu.vn and government agency websites with the domain name .gov.vn being inserted with gambling and betting advertisements; NCS conducted research and re-evaluated the situation. The results showed that the number of educational websites attacked still increased by 11% compared to the statistics of April 2023, with 190 websites being inserted with malicious code.

Meanwhile, in the state agencies sector, the number of websites with malicious code has decreased significantly (down more than 50% compared to April 2023 statistics), with only 76 websites still containing malicious advertising code.

NCS experts use automated analysis tools that only focus on scanning the surface of websites provided on the internet. This means that some websites that may have been compromised, hidden but have not shown any external signs will not be included in this statistic.

Although the keyword set for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) search orientation inserted on the websites is in Vietnamese, the new point is that the gambling websites redirected to by this attack campaign mostly have English interfaces, without a menu to switch to Vietnamese interface.

There are still 190 educational websites and 76 government agency websites with gambling and betting advertisements inserted.

A Vietnamese educational website was hacked, containing malicious code and illegal advertising.

According to Mr. Vu Ngoc Son, Director of NCS Technology, hacker attacks and the insertion of gambling and betting advertisements are not new and have been widely warned, however, the results of this review show that the reactions in the education sector and state agencies are quite different. While the state sector is quite active and has reduced the number of affected websites by more than 50%, the education sector is the opposite, with a slight increase of 11% compared to more than a month ago.

This partly reflects the current situation of information security personnel in agencies and organizations in Vietnam. State agencies have specialized IT departments, so they are better able to handle and remove malware, while educational institutions almost do not have such specialized departments, so the situation has not improved much after being warned.

According to NCS's analysis, some websites show signs of being attacked many times, showing that the way administrators handle incidents is not really thorough, leading to the system still containing vulnerabilities and hackers can re-infiltrate.

NCS recommends that administrators need to review everything from infrastructure design, security configuration, operating procedures to website source code, fully update vulnerability patches, and build 24/7 monitoring plans to proactively and promptly detect.

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