Vietnam loses US$ 125mil to computer viruses

Hanoi Times – A survey conducted by BKIS, the most prestigious anti-virus agency in Vietnam, shows that viruses caused losses of VND 591,000/user o­n average last year among at least four million Vietnamese computer users.

“To define the loss, we asked computer users to multiply the number of days in 2007 that they couldn’t work because of viruses by their daily average income,” said BKIS Director Nguyen Tu Quang.

Up to 96.5% of survey participants said their computers were attacked by malware in 2007 and the same number said their USB had a virus.

“The boom of new viruses last year led to this situation. My system recorded up to 33.6 million computers in Vietnam attacked by viruses,” BIKS expert Vu Ngoc Son said.

“If there were over 800 kinds of virus in 2006, it was over 6,000 in 2007,” Son added.

Vietnamese computer users often try to destroy viruses themselves by downloading the latest anti-virus versions from the Internet or asking help from people around them, but last year more consulted assistance from professional anti-virus agencies. The evidence is 16.16% of survey attendants said they asked for technical assistance from anti-virus agencies compared to 8.9% in 2006.