Cyberattacks are a constant threat to the operation of organizations and to national security. Cyberattacks are part of military strategies of many countries.

In recent wars, cyberattacks have been used by all sides in conjunction with military offensive operations.

Along with the escalation of the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine are hacker groups in cyberspace. Anonymous, for example, struggles against Russia, while GhostSec carries out DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks. Meanwhile, other hacker groups such as Conti, RedBanditsRU and Cooping Project oppose Ukraine.

Truong Duc Luong, CEO of VSEC, said the Russia-Ukraine conflict is highlighting the influence of non-traditional warfare in modern times.

Non-traditional war includes cyber security attack tools and before the hostilities escalate, related attacks already appear. People can read news such as attacks on railways, attacks on radio and television stations, and attacks on military control systems. These are all important national systems. And war makes activities more intense and prominent than usual. Attacked targets also have an increasingly significant influence in the space of conflict and heighten the role of non-traditional attacks.

“The impact of cyberattacks makes it necessary for all other nations, even ones that don’t get involved in armed conflict, to seriously review their national defenses and improve their overall capacity to fend off wars in the future, if they occur.

Commenting about the possible impact on Vietnam’s cyberspace, a representative of VSEC said cyberspace has no boundary and attacks to targets can be deployed easily, which only takes several minutes.

Vietnam will be affected by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but it’s difficult to quantify the influence. He explained that if the systems of Russia and Ukraine are attacked, these systems also exist in Vietnam (energy, railways… etc). If computers cannot be protected and are infected with malware, they would become part of the cyberattacks in Ukraine/Russia through botnets.

The representative of VSEC recommended that agencies, organizations and businesses check their systems to be sure that they can be protected at the highest possible level. Also, in case of armed conflicts, fake news will appear and people need to be cautious when collecting and analyzing news.

Van Anh

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