HCM City has recently faced many incidents related to ransomware, said Võ Minh Thành, deputy director of the city’s Department of Information and Communications.

Worryingly, cybercriminals were becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to bypass firewalls, causing a lot of damage to businesses, added Thành.

Ransomware is a form of malicious software specialised in encrypting data or locking user devices' access rights. To regain access to their devices or data, users must pay a ransom to the hacker.

“In fact, there are many comprehensive and synchronous, regular and continuous solutions, but individuals, organisations, agencies and businesses need to pay more attention to protect their information. Each unit needs to have a post-incident recovery plan and implement adequate legal measures, and the fight against crime needs to be enhanced,” said Thành.

Along with that, there needed relevant co-ordination between agencies, departments and experts to come up with the best solutions to ensure information security, he suggested.

At the seminar on risks and solutions to prevent ransomware attacks held in HCM City this week, Nguyễn Đức Chung, deputy director of HCM City Digital Transformation Centre, said the city had experienced 12,745,681 cases of information gathering attacks, and 1,858 cases of infection and dissemination of malicious code.

This showed that attacks on HCM City systems were still complicated.

The number of cyber attacks on information systems in Việt Nam was 2,323 in the first three months of this year.

A series of financial units, banks and public administrations were attacked, causing disruption, material damage and damaging the reputations of organisations and businesses.

Currently, the HCM City Data Centre has about 1,200 servers in operation, 380 systems are being deployed, including shared systems, the municipal information portal website and member pages, departments’ applications, people's committees of districts and Thủ Đức City, according to the centre.

Regarding the data transmission network, the number of connection lines is 807 main transmission points (Metronet) and 47 backup points, safely connected to the city’s data centre.

Transmission bandwidth has speeds from 1 Mbps to 200 Mbps according to actual usage needs.

HCM City has also deployed protection solutions to 68 State agencies in the city with more than 12,500 terminal devices. The system is connected and shared with the National Cyber Security Centre.

However, attacks through terminal devices in units are also quite complicated.

HCM City's terminal protection system also detected and prevented nearly 160,000 cases of attacks spreading malicious code in the first quarter of this year.

To ensure information security, the HCM City Data Centre has organised security with a three-layer firewall including outer layer security, application layer security and inner layer security.

Security solutions are enhanced in depth with advanced and modern technology. Information security events recorded at the data centre are connected and shared with the National Cyber Security Centre in accordance with regulations.

In addition, important information technology systems of the city such as email systems, integrated data sharing platform systems, cloud computing systems and specialised data transmission network systems are all approved with information security level records.