NCS’s experts said scammers used a familiar trick – sending phishing emails to lure users to forged log-in websites, thereby stealing users’ passwords.

The noteworthy point is that the scammers made corrupt use of a link with the website domain name of a large US bank (which has a branch in Vietnam) to conduct the fraudulent activity.

In the forged emails with the content that reminded them to update Office 365 passwords, hackers designed a button for users to click on to maintain the old passwords. 

However, in fact, this was a link that led to a forged website. If users clicked the button and entered their passwords, hackers would get the users’ accounts.

The danger was that the link to the website was a real link belonging to a bank in the US. This made it easy for users to be fooled.

Experts have recommended that if users have received emails of this type and if they have logged in to the forged website, they need to change the passwords of accounts immediately.

In order to prevent similar attacks in the future, users must not directly click on the links sent within emails, even though the links are real and they belong to well-known institutions. 

If people have demand for transactions, they should access directly the websites of the institutions and retype the required path in the browser.

Sources said to date the bank whose domain name was exploited to distribute the forged link has fixed the vulnerability and the link has become inaccessible. 

However, people who clicked the link before have been asked to change the passwords of email accounts to ensure safety.

According to CyRadar 2023, about 1.5 million malicious domain names appear each month, while domain names related to online phishing are on the rise.

Cyberspace is now the living, working, learning and entertainment space of about 78 million Vietnamese people, or 79.1 percent of the population. Each Vietnamese person uses cyberspace on average for six hours and 23 minutes a day.

However, according to the Authority of Information Security (AIS), cyberspace is not safe. A report showed that there are about 1,000 cyberattacks each second and five malicious codes are created together with 40 new vulnerabilities and holes each day. On average, every person bears 3.5 cyberattacks a year.

AIS reported that in 2022, the agency detected, warned and instructed to deal with more than 12,000 cyberattacks into information systems in Vietnam that caused incidents. In the first four months of 2023, the number of attacks warned by AIS and instructed to handle totaled 3,944.

Van Anh