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.