Banks warn against password protection after 400,000 emails leaked

Users should not use the same password for multiple accounts and should have separate passwords for bank accounts.

The above recommendation has just been issued by the Bank for Foreign Trade - Vietcombank after the urgent warning to change passwords from the Department of Information Security - Ministry of Information and Communications. This unit said that many email accounts of many agencies and organizations in Vietnam had their information and passwords leaked.

Vietcombank believes that users should not use the same password for multiple accounts, especially bank accounts that must have a separate password.

Banks recommend protecting passwords to avoid losing money.

In addition, users should avoid using email addresses of organizations and agencies to register for social networking sites and public news sites. At the same time, people with bank accounts should not set passwords that are too weak, too short, less than 6 characters, or based on name, age, date of birth, consecutive numbers or other easily guessable factors.

In addition, the bank recommends that users should periodically change their personal passwords and should not log into their bank accounts on any website other than the bank's official website.

This recommendation was made after the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Center - VNCERT, on December 26, issued a warning about "the exposure of 1.4 billion accounts and passwords from social networking sites and online services".

Through monitoring incidents in cyberspace, the center recorded a large number of email accounts and passwords leaked worldwide from social networks and online services such as Bitcoin, Pastein, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netflix, Last.FM, Zoosk, Badoo, RedBox...

This center analyzed and found that the number of email accounts in Vietnam with the extension ".vn" is 437,664 accounts, including 930 email accounts of state agencies with the extension "gov.vn" and many email accounts of corporations and important infrastructure enterprises of Vietnam.

VNCERT assesses that the disclosure of email account information and passwords will create conditions for hackers to exploit and log into many other information systems. If successful, they will take over the accounts and use them to attack, steal and destroy systems and data.

Thanh Le/VnExpress