ChongLuaDao () is a Vietnamese non-profit cybersecurity organization that helps clients verify the legitimacy of websites and block access to dangerous ones to keep them safe while using the internet. This non-profit project was started by a group of Vietnamese computer security specialist, including Hieu Minh Ngo, a former hacker who is now a technical expert for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Le Phuoc Hoa, Nguyen Hoang Thang, and Nguyen Hung.
Beginning
After serving his time in U.S. federal prison for stealing persons' personally identifiable information, hacker Hieu Minh Ngo (also known as HieuPC) left for Vietnam in August 2020. Hieu is considered "one of the most prolific identity thieves ever to grace a federal prison". Returning to Vietnam in the wake of a surge in cybercrime, he has teamed up with a number of other professionals in information security to launch a nonprofit project aimed at preventing cybercrime, alerting users to bad websites, and protecting them from malicious content. Hieu claims that Scam Fighter is a project he has cherished during his time in the US. These are all purportedly part of HieuPC's "rehabilitation" efforts, along with several other community initiatives.
A group of programming and information security specialists composed the core team of the project, including Nguyen Manh Luat, Nguyen Hung, Le Phuoc Hoa, Pham Tien Manh, Tran Dai Chi, and Hieu Minh Ngo. The project team has so far included roughly 30 people. Additionally, Duong Ngoc Thai, a former Google engineer and leader of the security and application encryption team, serves as the project's confidential data security counsel for its customers.
Launch and development
The non-profit ChongLuaDao officially started operations on December 27, 2020. The "ChongLuaDao" project, including the website and the plug-in extension, is formally launched by February 2021, with server infrastructure operated by Vietnix Hosting. The plug-in extension has more than 3,500 downloads, more than 70,000 views, and has added more than 1,000 scam websites to the denylist as a result of more than 1,400 user reports in just one day after introduction. They also teamed up with Anti-Phishing Working Group to share data on cyberthreats. As of October of the same year, the average monthly traffic to the website of ChongLuaDao to test the reliability of another website was about 35,000. They continued to release apps for Android and deploy application development for IOS after the plug-in extension's success on web browser platforms. The application was created using machine learning techniques and often updated datasets that were derived from community contributions. Their chatbot debuted on Facebook Messenger in September. Through this, Facebook users may instantly assess the trustworthiness and security of a website on their phone while chatting live with automated software. Hieu Minh Ngo announced the establishment of the ChongLuaDao Social Enterprise Limited Liability Company (also known as the ChongLuaDao Company) on November 24, 2021, of which he served as CEO.
During the final few months of 2022, Vietnamese users are often deceived by phony applications and websites that steal personal information. Reports of fraudulent banking domains are regularly sent to the ChongLuaDao Project. Their main message was to call for community engagement to protect oneself and those around them. By the start of 2023, ChongLuaDaol had attracted more than 300,000 users to join the community through Telegram, Facebook, and web browser extensions, helping more than 11,000 victims of cyber fraud. In its more than two years of operation, the project has received collaboration and support from significant institutions and tech companies like PhishTank, Meta, and Viettel Cyber Security. A database of 15,000 malicious URLs, including websites that steal personal information, are malicious, or contain malware, has been made available to users. The project discovered more than 3,200 fake websites taking assets and collecting user data in the first quarter of 2023. Additionally, the app has 50,000 regular users, and its widgets and API threat feeds have been included in many other worldwide products, such as those from Kaspersky Anti-Virus software and Cisco (OpenDNS), Viettel, and CyRadar, among other security and cybersecurity firms.