HANOI, June 12 (Xinhua) -- Over 60 million computers in Vietnam are infected with malicious codes each year, according to the country's leading computer security firm BKAV on Tuesday.

The most common malicious codes are those used by hackers to mine digital currencies, encrypt data, steal personal information, spread viruses via USB drives, and launch APT (advanced persistent threat) attacks.

BKAV said over 735,000 computers in Vietnam have recently been infected with a cryptocurrency-mining virus, and more than 1.2 million computers have been infected with W32.XFileUSB which spreads through USB drives.

According to the firm's calculation, malware infections made computer users in Vietnam to suffer losses of 12.3 trillion Vietnamese dong (544 million U.S. dollars) in 2017, up from 10.4 trillion Vietnamese dong in 2016, some 8.7 trillion Vietnamese dong in 2015, and 8.5 trillion Vietnamese dong in 2014.

According to the Authority of Information Security under the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications, in the first five months of this year, nearly 19.6 million turns of Vietnamese IP (Internet Protocol) addresses were mobilized for botnets of hackers in the world. A botnet is a network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled as a group without the owners' knowledge.

The high rate of malware infections in Vietnam is mainly attributed to the low rate of using copyrighted software, including anti-virus ones, according local experts.

Besides, Vietnamese computer users rarely update software to patch security holes, experts said, noting that up to 40 percent of computers in Vietnam face the SMB (Server Message Block) flaw.