The Authority of Information Security under Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications has issued a new warning about advertising content for betting and online gambling on state-run websites and portals.

Gambling services run these advertising content on the websites of the state-run organizations and agencies, whose domain names end with gov.vn, to increase search rankings for those services as the webpages are always rated as reputable by search engines like Google.

The gov.vn domain signifies a website belonging to organizations and agencies under the government of Vietnam.

The annoying advertisements for illegal services such as betting and online gambling are uploaded on those government websites via a number of features like Q&A and file uploading.

The advertisements entice visitors to the websites to download applications or access web-based services of online casinos, sports betting, lotteries, slot games, fish shooting games, and 3D card games.

Besides, scammers can take advantage of weaknesses and security loopholes on the state-run websites to change the content on the interface, thereby affecting other websites on the same server.

This is not the first time that advertisements for gambling games have invaded state-run Vietnamese agencies’ websites.

The issue has recurred since those websites have been outdated and full of security errors, according to Internet security experts, and the Ministry of Information and Communications has issued two similar warnings since the end of 2022.

The two dispatches named 170 state-run websites being disturbed by advertisements for the aforementioned illegal services, requiring drastic prevention actions.

The ministry also advised that state agencies improve and regularly assess the security level of the websites and information technology systems under their management as a long-term approach.

Particularly, the agencies can have their web administrators scrutinize content contributed by users before allowing it onto the pages. 

However, a number of the affected organizations and agencies have only taken temporary measures such as removing the unauthorized content, instead of finding the cause and handling it thoroughly.

The Authority of Information Security plans to regularly review and warn about the risks of information insecurity from the running of malicious content on the websites of state-run organizations and agencies in the coming time, as well as give instructions for the affected agencies to deal with the issue.

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