McAfee exaggerates the risk of the .vn website

Surveys with nearly 70,000 .vn websites using McAfee's website security assessment tool show that only 2.33% of websites contain malicious code, a very small percentage of the company's previous research results.

>>> Is it the most dangerous .vn domain in the world?

According to a survey published more than two weeks ago by McAfee, .vn domain names become the most dangerous web addresses in the world when 58% of .vn websites contain malicious code that poses a risk to the visitors. counter. Meanwhile, the 2009 survey of this company also made only 0.9% of the .vn domain name website containing malicious code and ranked 39th in the world in terms of danger level.

This number has received a lot of objection from security experts in Vietnam because although the safety status of websites in Vietnam is not much attention but not to the " red alert " level as McAfee launched.

McAfee exaggerates the risk of the .vn website Picture 1
(Artwork: Netsuccessprofit)

Only 2.33 .vn websites contain malicious code

Based on the above evaluation results of McAfee, BKIS collaborated with Vietnam Internet Network Information Center (VNNIC) to conduct a survey by using the site McAfee's malicious website assessment tool SiteAdvisor.

' I believe that if you evaluate the 58% of the .vn websites that are found to contain McAfee's malicious code, at least this tool will show similar results because SiteAdvisor was born to fight. The price of other websites is safe, "said Nguyen Minh Duc, BKIS's Network Security Manager.

Thanks to the help of VNNIC, BKIS has obtained a complete list of all over 170,000 active .vn domain names. However, BKIS only experimented with about 68,682 .vn domain names because of security reasons and the number of such domain names is enough to check part of McAfee's evaluation.

As a result, SiteAdvisor only knew about 5104 websites, of which only 119 websites were warned of danger, and the remaining 4985 websites were warned to be safe. Thus, the website rate determined by the SiteAdvisor tool is only 2.33% (quite far from the 58% conclusion of the surveyed .vn website that contains malicious code given by McAfee).

' I can not conclude that their survey numbers are true or false because they can be taken from many sources but it is clearly not shown on the tools of their website evaluation,' Mr. Duc said. Although the website has not been checked 119 websites, SiteAdvisor is harmful, but according to BKIS's observation, most of them fall into personal websites or small websites.

This is only phase 1 of the process of reviewing the security status of websites using .vn domain names. Phase 2 is being checked by other units in Vietnam along with BKIS to assess the security status of all .vn websites by using query tools to websites to display a list of directory trees. , the public files of a website such as image file, html file . Next, BKIS will download the file, the folder and scan to see if the site has malicious code or not. ' Because this job takes a lot of time and there are more than 100 thousand websites, BKIS cannot predict exactly when it will be done, ' said Duc.

VNNIC: Reasonable results

Talking to reporters from Vietnam Post Newspaper, Mr. Tran Minh Tan, VNNIC Deputy Director, said that with the result of 2.33% of websites containing the .vn domain name are identified as dangerous on McAfee's own tool that BKIS The implementation shows that McAfee may not have actually evaluated the situation.

' In a way, in my opinion, it is possible that McAfee has surveyed websites of Vietnamese users in general, including websites using cheap international domain names, not just domain name websites. .vn ', Mr. Tan said. Therefore, if evaluating McAfee is correct, most will fall into the cheap international domain names that the Vietnamese are using.

According to Mr. Tan, most of the websites with many potential security risks in Vietnam are websites that use free hosting of foreign countries so security security barriers will not be implemented and often used. with international domain names.

For websites that use the .vn domain name, when customers have registered to use the national domain name, they have acknowledged the importance of security settings. In addition, usually the service packages accompanying the .vn domain name of Vietnamese suppliers have solutions on security, security and database management at a relative level.

' Although the security status of Vietnam is not really good, the level of risk and potential security of domain name .vn is so much as 58% as McAfee warns is unfounded ', Mr. Tan conclude.

SiteAdvisor is a software that can analyze and identify ' dirty ' and unsafe websites to alert users before they visit. When accessing a site with potential threats, SiteAdvisor's warning area on the browser window will be red. If the warning area is green, it means the site has been properly censored, and the color shown on this site has not been reviewed by SiteAdvisor.

It is expected that in the coming time, BKIS and VNNIC will continue to coordinate with each other in evaluating monthly updates on the danger level of .vn websites and alerting the owners of those websites. .