From LED screen hole

The story of the strange words "The bookmaker from Africa" ​​appearing at the gate of An Son commune, Thuan An city (Binh Duong) has surprised many people, but right in Hai Duong, the electronic boards at Cam Che Kindergarten and Cam Che Secondary School (Thanh Ha) were also hacked by bad guys, changing the displayed content to online game advertisements which are very offensive and not suitable for the educational environment.

The police had to investigate and warn agencies and units with LED electronic boards to improve security, change wifi passwords, and prevent bad guys from infiltrating and changing propaganda content for bad purposes.

From the story of LED boards being hijacked and their content being changed, I am reminded of the recent cases of dirty ads being inserted into some government agency websites. These incidents show many loopholes in website management and electronic device management of many agencies, units and businesses.

At the Information Technology and Information Security Conference - CIO CSO Summit 2023 with the theme "Information Security Investment Orientation for the Digital Future" recently organized by the Department of Information Security (Ministry of Information and Communications) in Hanoi, information from Viettel showed that this year, up to 12 million accounts in Vietnam were hacked; 48 million data records of individuals and organizations were leaked and sold on cyberspace. Another very interesting figure is that up to 5,800 domain names were used to create fake pages of banks, e-wallets, manufacturing enterprises, retail enterprises... to defraud and appropriate users' assets.

Despite being warned, in reality, the issue of ensuring network information security is still not of concern to many people. I have a friend who, although not very old, is very afraid of accessing information technology. Most of the accounts used for work, he leaves the password as given by the supplier, does not change when using, because he has too many accounts, and resets the password for each one, so he cannot remember them all. Sometimes, he asks someone to change the password and saves it on the device so that every time he opens the computer or phone, he can automatically log in to the account. Therefore, sometimes I see him create a new Facebook account with the reason that the old account was hacked and cannot be retrieved. People like my friend are not rare. Many people, when installing security cameras for their families, leave the password setting to the device seller, and then use that password. What will happen if the accounts and passwords of these cameras fall into the wrong hands?

In 2023, through inspection, the inter-sectoral inspection of Hai Duong province also pointed out many limitations in network information security of a number of agencies and units such as the existence of website security vulnerabilities, many users did not change the default account password provided by the service provider, did not use firewall systems, copyrighted anti-virus software for agency and personal computer systems, etc.

There are many reasons for the above limitations. One of them is due to awareness and level of information technology (IT). In the strong development of the digital age, many agencies and units are facing the difficulty of lacking IT human resources. Most people who are good at information technology find good jobs in businesses with high salaries. With the current salary of civil servants, public employees and the contract mechanism with agencies and public service units, it is very difficult to recruit good IT engineers. This is also the reason why many places waste software because there are no knowledgeable people to exploit all the features of the application. Also due to the lack of knowledgeable people in information technology, there are many loopholes in system administration and security. Some agencies and units have used the solution of hiring businesses to support information technology, but in the long term, a mechanism is needed for the state sector to proactively source IT human resources to ensure digital transformation requirements.

For each individual, it is still important to self-study and update knowledge about network security for themselves and their families.