Vietnam strives to up Internet oversight

To celebrate Safe Internet Day, authorities held a symposium on digital citizenship toward a safer Internet in Hanoi on February 22.

Illustrative photo. (Source: tuoitre.vn)

The symposium was co-organised by the Vietnam Internet Association (VIA), VietNet Information Technology and Communication Centre (VietNet-ICT) and SecDev Foundation.

Over the years, Safer Internet Day (SID) has become a landmark event in the online safety calendar. Starting as an initiative of the EU SafeBorders project in 2004 and taken up by the Insafe network as one of its earliest actions in 2005, Safer Internet Day has grown beyond its traditional geographic zone and is now celebrated in more than 100 countries worldwide, and across all continents.

Vu Hoang Lien, VIA Chairman, praised the Internet for its contribution to the growth of the country, citing remarkable growth in e-commerce and other socio-economic sectors and industries.

“However, Vietnam faces many difficulties and challenges on the Internet and in IT infrastructure, human resources, information security and cyber safety,” said Lien.

Nguyen Thanh Hai, Director of the Authority of Information Security under the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), emphasised risks and negative impacts of the Internet’s growth, including intellectual property, technology theft, copyright infringement and cyber espionage, which are all becoming more complicated and dangerous.

In addition, many exploit the Internet to spread false or unverified information to slander individuals, organisations or brands, he said.

Statistics form the Authority of Information Security showed that 53 percent of the Vietnamese population uses the Internet. The country also ranked at 16th place in the top 20 Internet users in Asia.

However, the Information Security Index of Vietnam 2015 (VNISA Index 2015) was only 46.4 percent, under the average. Last year, the country also saw series of events on Internet security such as hacking to systems of big banks and airports.

(Source: VNA)