In the region, it ranked just below China, while globally it was after China, the U.S., France, Russia, and Brazil, according to data gathered by Hong Kong-based Nexusguard, a leading cloud-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) security solutions provider.

A DDoS is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet.

Incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources, effectively making it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.

Nexusguard has said Vietnam is now in a precarious position, a meeting heard in Hanoi Friday.

Vietnam accounted for 3.53 percent of DDoS attacks around the world in the last quarter of 2018 compared to 9.52 percent for China.

Nguyen Huy Dung, acting head of the Authority of Information Security, told the meeting that these days it has become much easier to carry out DDoS attacks and preventing them, much harder.

His agency has now developed a system to fight cyberattacks by linking with businesses and Internet providers to handle DDoS attacks on significant data bases, he said.

Nexusguard has also warned about DDoS attacks aimed at communication service providers, including telecom suppliers.

Perpetrators are using smaller, bit-and-piece methods to inject junk into legitimate traffic, causing attacks to bypass detection rather than sounding alarms with large, obvious attack spikes, the company said.

Last September Russia’s Kaspersky Lab named Vietnam among the top 10 countries hit by DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2017 and also among the top 10 nations affected by botnet-assisted DDoS attacks as more than 637,000 computers were hit.