McAfee, the anti-virus solution provider, has released a report, saying that Vietnamese domains have become easy prey for technology criminals. However, Vietnamese experts still have doubts about the survey.

McAfee, using the database of Global Threat Intelligence service, analyzed 27 million websites from 120 countries. The database gathers the information from 150 million photodiodes located in 120 countries.

McAfee has found out that 58 percent of websites with the domain suffix “. vn” contain penetrating codes. When accessing the dangerous websites, computer users would have their sensitive information stolen. In general, 6.2 percent of total 27 million websites have been considered as “having high risks”. The figure is higher than the figure released last year, 5.9 percent.

Other websites which are considered high risk may contain some penetrating software which exploit programming holes to install attacking codes onto the computers of Internet users.

The web environment has become harsher – this is the conclusion by McAfee when viewing the recent activities of hackers.

The survey by McAfee pointed out that Vietnam has become the attractive destination for high-technology criminals in this year. In 2009, Vietnam’s domains only ranked 39th on the list of the riskiest domains worldwide. In this year’s report, Vietnam’s domains rank third on the list of most dangerous domains (29.4 percent), just behind commercial domains “.com” (31.3 percent) and “. infor”. Meanwhile, “.vn” is considered the most dangerous national domain in the world.

About 15,000 out of 24,000 websites with suffix “. vn” have been reportedly exploited and controlled by hackers.

Other national domains which also have high risks include Cameroon (.cm – 22,2%), Armenia (.am – 12,1%), Cocos (.cc – 10,5%) and Russia (.ru – 10,1%).

Among general domains, domains with the suffix “. infor” became popular in 2010 with its number of dangerous websites increasing by 94.5 percent. The number of risky domains with the suffix “.com” has reached one million.

To explain the increases of the penetrating activities, McAfee Labs’ Internet Security Research Director Paula Greve said hackers always target the regions which have low website registration fees and low risks of being discovered. Therefore, very safe websites this year can be the targets of hackers the next year.

However, Buu dien newspaper quoted Hoang Minh Cuong, Deputy Director of the Vietnam Internet Network Information Centre (VNNIC) as saying that there are many “doubtful” points in the survey. “It is nearly impossible to see the number of dangerous websites increasing so dramatically over just one year,” he said.

Agreeing with Cuong, Nguyen Minh Duc, Director of BKIS (Bach Khoa Internet Security Centre), also said BKIS is quite surprised with the survey released by McAfee, especially because BKIS always works with malicious websites containing the codes exploited in Vietnam. BKIS thinks that the result released by McAfee is not very accurate. Among the 25,000 surveyed domains (Vietnam now has 170,000 websites with “.vn” domain, more than 50 percent of which are websites with malicious codes. “This means that there is a high probability of accessing the “.vn” websites which contain malicious codes. Meanwhile, the probability is low for normal internet users.

According to BKIS, in 2009, 1000 website attack cases in Vietnam were reported, while the figure in 2010 is about 700-800. The attacks mostly targeted the government’s websites (“.gov.vn”).

Buu dien also has quoted Vu Quoc Khanh, Director of Vietnam Computer Emergency Respond Team (VNCERT) under the Ministry of Information and Communication as saying that the ministry will contact McAfee to clarify the method McAfee used.

Prior to that, Kaspersky also released a report with similar pessimistic result.