Vietnamese government agencies’ ignorance places their websites in grave danger of being attacked, an official told a conference in the central province of Thua Thien – Hue on Friday.

The conference was organized in Hue Town by the Ministry of Information and Communications, the Thua Thien – Hue People’s Committee, and the Vietnam Association for Information Processing.

Nguyen Huu Hung, deputy chief of the code division under the national cipher department tasked with state management of secret codes, quoted a 2012 survey of the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team as saying that 54 percent of agencies had failed to recognize attacks.

It found that 64 percent of agencies were unable to estimate financial losses resulting from attacks, he said.

The Vietnam Information Security Association’s survey also pointed out that 78 out of 100 websites with the government domain “gov.vn” had “seriously” poor security systems, the official said.

In the meantime time, malware, including viruses, spread easily via emails and USB flash drives, Hung said.

New viruses are usually attached in emails sent from fake addresses of the agencies’ staff and officials, and the emails are often about salaries or business trips, he added.

Nguyen Ai Viet, director of the Institute of Information Technology, agreed with Hung, saying that reasons behind the loss of Internet security in Vietnam include limited technical capacity and insufficient investment.

Viet also quoted the Ministry of Public Security’s statistics as saying that more than 90 percent of websites belonging to agencies of the Party, the government and banks have been hacked and had their data stolen.

Nguyen Minh Duc, director of Bach Khoa Internetwork Security Company’s Internet Security Division, told the meeting that at least 14,000 computers in Vietnam were attacked last month.

They were all hacked with the "distributed denial-of-service" (DDoS) scheme that paralyzed their resources and prevented others from accessing them, he said, citing that popular online newspapers likeTuoi Tre (Youth) and VietNamNet became inaccessible for several days following repeated attacks.