PC-viruses Caused VND 8 Trillion Loss to Vietnamese during Past 12 Months, finds Bkav

According to a report by Saigon Economic Times short of Thoi bao Kinh te Sai Gon dated 4th June 2013 referring to one research by Bkav the Internet security company in Vietnam, PC-users across the country had to lose almost VND 8trillion or USD 378.42m because of viruses during the year just gone by, published thanhniennews.com dated June 6, 2013.

Bkav stated that the loss was immense despite it being far less compared to developed nations for instance United Kingdom where it was computed as USD 43bn per annum.

The research was conducted during April 2013 when the security company gathered statistics keeping mean earnings of PC-users as the main factor in consideration along with the time-span of their work that got interrupted owing to their PCs becoming infected with viruses, indicated the news item.

Further Bkav, through its research, as well discovered that Vietnamese PCs displayed an increasing tendency towards becoming contaminated via USB sticks having malware. Accordingly, 93% of those surveyed stated that malware had infected their USBs a minimum of one time during the past year, accounting for a 5% rise from year to year.

During May alone, this year (2013), Vietnam encountered 2,636 PC-viruses that contaminated more than 4m devices all over the country.

About 425 Vietnamese company websites succumbed to hackers' assaults in May 2013 of which 9 instances were due to local hackers while foreign ones hacked in 416 instances.

Meanwhile, Bkav's other statistics show that Vietnamese remain aware about e-mail attachments. So while, merely 11% of Internauts proceed to instantly view a text file carrying the e-mail matter, over 60% proceed to view solely whilst sure about the sender alternatively, open the file in safe mode. Rest of the Internauts too exercise caution and simply view those files of relevance to them.

Moreover, towards the concluding period of 2012, spyware attacks infected the computers of various Vietnamese enterprises and agencies when end-users viewed text files having .ppt, .xls or .doc extensions that arrived as e-mail attachments.

For averting spyware attacks via text files, security specialists advise end-users to deploy spyware/keyloggers anti-blocking devices as also anti-virus programs.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/11/2013