Nowadays, the wide penetration of IT has offered lots of benefits, but at the same time brought multiple challenges of data privacy and cyber security.

Cyber security, privacy and information security at enterprises are now at an alarming level when hacker, virus, malware attacks make computers’ data, information vulnerable to be deleted, stolen, followed, warranty-lost, virus-injected from one to another,  causing gigantic impacts and damages to enterprises’ finance, reputation in the long run.

Cyber security in Vietnam has turned into hot topic after a series of large attacks into Vietnamese websites since August through October of this year.

One example was seen targeted malicious outage by a group of professional hackers on websites run by the Vietnam Communications Corporation (VCCorp) within five days on October 13-18, 2014, causing a damage of VND20-30 billion ($950,000-$1.4 million) for VCCorp itself and other partners.

“Privacy and information security are in emergency due to panic situation relating to increasingly new and complicated privacy breaches, new hack models and tricks in current information environment, however, many enterprises are seemingly indifferent with current information security,” said Nguyen Manh Quy, Ho Chi Minh City chief representative of Copyright Office of Vietnam.

Cyber insecurity proves complicated, which entailed risks to threaten socio-economic development, defense and security assurance. One major cause for this increased risk is the use and installation of pirated software as many studies have shown.

According to a joint study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) and National University of Singapore (NUS) which was announced in Hanoi this May, APAC (Asia Pacific) enterprises were expected to spend nearly $230 billion in the four first months of 2014 to deal with issues caused by malware deliberately loaded onto pirated software, $59 billion of which were dealing with security issues while $170 billion dealing with data breaches.

According to the survey, APAC governments were estimated to possibly lose approximately $50 billion to treat malware problems in pirated software. Besides, 90 per cent of pirated software contains viruses and malware in it, an ideal environment for hackers to penetrate into information system.

Enterprises that are using or installing illegal software will have a 73 per cent higher risk of losing important data, 55 per cent of unrecoverable data when the host system risks being broken, which not only causes damages to privacy and information security of their own but also expands the infection to the community.

Hence, it is possible to say, illegal software is considered a major threat and cause for cyber security attack, data interruption and losses of vital information.