The Network Security and Data Protection Conference and Showcase 2007, the first of this kind in Vietnam, kicked off here Tuesday, acting as an independent forum for government agencies, and Vietnamese and foreign firms to seek relevant solutions for the country's information technology development.

There are many security holes in Vietnam's websites, mainly because software developers have yet to pay due attention to network security, and organizations and enterprises spend little money on the security and safety, Nguyen Viet The, director of the Informatics Technology Department, affiliated to the General Department of Technology under the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, said at the two-day conference.

"Over 20 Vietnamese websites were attacked by hackers in January 2007.. According to the BKAV (Bach Khoa Inter-network Security Center under the Hanoi University of Technology), among 340 websites of well-known organizations and enterprises tested by the BKAV in 2006, up to 90 websites had security holes," he said.

According to the BKAV, famous for its anti-virus software called BKAV, 880 new viruses attacked computers in Vietnam in 2006, nearly four times bigger than the figure in 2005, causing an average loss of some 30.5 U.S. dollars to each user.

Security strategies need to be increasingly dynamic and always changing to timely respond to sophisticated threats, said Linus Lai, research director of the International Data Corporation, at the conference, noting that security today is about dynamic resilience, or proactively ensuring security, business continuity, network availability, and application access.

Some 500 Vietnamese and foreign delegates to the conference, organized by the General Department of Technology and the International Data Group, are to mainly discuss Vietnam's network security and data protection situations and solutions, security services and business continuity in the Asia-Pacific region in the 2006-2010 period, and anti-cyber crimes.

Source: Xinhua