Vietnam suffers most phishing attacks on small businesses in Southeast Asia

Vietnam led Southeast Asia in the number of phishing attacks targeting small enterprises in the first half of this year. There were more than 1.6 million attacks on small and medium-sized enterprises with 50-250 employees in the region, up 39 percent from the same period last year, Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab said a report it released on Tuesday.

Vietnam accounted for 464,300, followed by Indonesia (406,200) and Malaysia (269,500). Singapore had the least number of attacks, but the number of cases was up 60.5 percent. On a global scale, Brazil topped followed by Russia, France, Columbia, and the U.S.

The most common scams included using information about the novel coronavirus as bait, swindling people by offering to sell masks, seeking donations for vaccine research, and offering relief payments.

The report also mentioned several other common phishing tricks such as evaluating job performance, important announcements from administrators, requesting emergency password checks, and urgent press releases.

Yeo Siang Tiong, Kaspersky’s general manager for Southeast Asia, said the surge in attacks in Southeast Asia was due to the fact many companies let employees work from home since the end of March, resulting in a large number of users clicking on an infected link or attachment.

Vietnam recorded 2,017 cyber attacks on its information systems in the first half of 2020, down 27.1 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Information and Communications’ Department of Information Security.