Outage of Vietnamese News Sites Caused by Country’s Largest Attack Ever

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

A joint investigation by leading Vietnamese web host VCCorp and police has determined that a massive outage last week was caused by an attack which is being called the largest ever cyberattack in Vietnam. VCCorp hosts numerous Vietnamese news sites, which were knocked offline on Monday October 13th, and gradually came back online over two days.

During the outage websites displayed the message “Data center is experiencing problems. Please come back later,” according to Tuoi Tre News. The outage was initially blamed on a technical issue at the company’s data center, but the possibility of “third party” interference was acknowledged by VCCorp.

The attack did took down VCCorp-hosted news sites giadinh.net.vn, nld.com.vn, dantri.com.vn and others, as well as a number of VCCopr-operated news sites. Despite this, Tran Quang Chien, managing director of local cybersecurity site SecurityDaily said the attack was unusual in that it did not simply target user information, shut down platforms or change interfaces.

“The hackers went much further this time by deliberately deleting all of VCCorp’s data in a way that would make it hard for the system administrators to retrieve the [data] loss,” Chien said, calling it “the largest cyberattack, with the most severe damage, ever in Vietnam.”

Tuoi Tre cites unverified reports suggesting that the attack originated from within the company, and also says that experts consider most online service providers in Vietnam to be lax on internet security.

Earlier this month FireEye and SingTel announced a partnership to address the APAC cybersecurity market.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/outage-vietnamese-news-sites-caused-countrys-largest-attack-ever