“Businesses only pay attention to their information system when they encounter problems,” Dong said, “They only try to overcome those problems after the fact, instead of building a safe information system from the start.”

According to a report from the Internet Security Centre of Hanoi University of Technologies (BKIS), 342 websites in the country were hacked last year. Of those, Vietnamese hackers were behind 118 of the cases.

Moreover, 140 websites were found having serious errors, according to the report.

BKIS’s statistics show that 20 local websites were hacked last month, of which 13 were hacked by Vietnamese and seven by foreigners.

Many of those websites belonged to established companies. Eight of them were extremely vulnerable to the hackers’ tactics.

Though date losses can prove to be disastrous, many companies are forced to put up with hackers because they do not have the money to better protect themselves.

The director of one commercial website had to pay a partner tens of thousands of dollars in compensation when hackers broke into his website.

Next month, the National Assembly is expected to pass an amended code of criminal law that gives courts the option of punishing online crimes with jail time, not just financial fines as was seen in the previous cases.

According to IT experts, three factors are essential to a safe information system. First, the server must be placed on a network system designed to be protected at various levels and be controlled by specialized network security devices like firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS). Also, distant accesses to the server must go through a safe connection channel Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Second, operating systems and application softwares like web servers and mail servers must be configured with the most up-to-date versions to ensure security.