Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defense announced the establishment of a command center to protect the country’s sovereignty in cyberspace on Monday.

The Cyberspace Operations Command has been established pursuant to a government decree, the defense ministry said at a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi.

The ministry-run unit is tasked with protecting Vietnam’s sovereignty on the Internet and overseeing ICT-related issues in the military.

The command will play a key role in national defense in cyberspace, the fight against online criminals and other hostile forces.

“Along with the technological and scientific breakthroughs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, cyberspace has become a new territory playing a crucial role in the socio-economic development, security, national defense and foreign affairs of every country,” PM Phuc said in his remarks.

According to the premier, this is why many other countries have also founded special units to combat threats in cyberspace and to protect their online sovereignty.

PM Phuc suggested that the Central Party Committee of the People's Army of Vietnam and the Ministry of National Defense develop the new command into an elite, efficient, loyal and intelligent unit to “fight and win” in protecting Vietnam’s national sovereignty on the Internet.

In December 2017, a three-star Vietnamese general revealed that the country had deployed a cyber taskforce to fight the dissemination of false and derogatory information online.

Force 47 consists of more than 10,000 "core fighters," according to Colonel General Nguyen Trong Nghia, deputy chairman of the General Political Department of the People’s Army of Vietnam.

Last year saw Vietnamese lawmakers working to enact social media regulation, highlighting the country’s need to counter new threats in cyberspace.

Through the Ministry of Information and Communications, the government insisted that Facebook and YouTube remove accounts and videos that Vietnamese regulators deem "toxic" or inappropriate to national interests.

Both Internet giants obeyed the ministry’s request, with 159 accounts removed from the world’s largest social media network in 2017, and some 4,500 “toxic” videos purged from YouTube.

It is now estimated that sixty-million of Vietnam’s population of approximately 90 million have access to the Internet.

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