HANOI, April 17 (Xinhua) -- As one of the vulnerable countries to today's more and more sophisticated and large-scale cyber attacks, there is a growing challenge facing Vietnam to keep national cyber security safe, Vietnamese and foreign delegates said at the 2019 Vietnam Security Summit held here Wednesday.

At the summit themed "Cyber Security in the Age of Digital Transformation", with the participation of over 700 Vietnamese and foreign delegates, officials from the Vietnamese ministries of Information and Communications, and Public Security said that in 2018, Vietnam encountered 3,818 deface attacks, 1,800 phishing attacks, and 949 malware attacks, and that cyber crimes caused losses of 642 million U.S. dollars to the country.

Representatives of Vietnamese and foreign cyber security firms also said that in Vietnam last year, over 1.6 million computers lost data, 60 percent of network systems were infected with ransomware, and there were more than 15,700 security breaches in software and applications.

During the summit, hosted by the Authority of Information Security under the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications, delegates focused their discussions on cyber security management and data center protection, and prevention of malware, backdoor attacks and information breaches. They also attended live security demos.

The summit also included an expo with the participation of 26 Vietnamese and foreign information technology firms, including global giants such as China's Huawei, the United States' RSA, Israel's Check Point and South Korea's Samsung.