Cyber crime in the UAE – great dangers, a growing challenge
The UAE is becoming a growing target for cyber crime both domestically and externally. This is because; it is a central axis in the Middle East, mainly due to developed infrastructure of information systems, connectivity, business environment and being the focus of many international organizations, as well as having a high international profile. All these make the UAE a priority target for cyber criminals.
On April 18th it was posted that deterioration occurred in 2015, the threat profile of the UAE, after rising to the 41st place from 49th it was a year earlier. Among countries in the Middle East, it dropped one place to sixth place ranking.
The cyber crime activities in the UAE, mostly, are “Spear phishing” attacks, being the first among the countries of the Middle East and eighth globally. Alongside various malwares also constitute a common threat to the UAE, when 1 out of 199 emails contained malware and 55.2% of the emails were spam. Accordingly, the UAE was the source of the greater portion of spam messages worldwide, which is reflected in rising from 51st in 2014 to 31st in 2015 in this area.
An example of this was published on December 27th 2015 by the Ajman police that cyber manipulation activities is rising; 4 in 2013, 6 in 2014 and 17 in 2015. For the most part this is a local “young people under 25 who target random men and women for monetary purposes or illicit relationships. While attacking foreign nationals mostly businessmen for quick financial gain “.
In this context, it was published on May 8th that about half of the organizations in the UAE have been subjected to at least one case of an incident or security breach in the last year, however, 60% reported security issues related to mobile phones (loss, malware, various scams).
An example is the news on April 24th 2016 on the Chinese citizen resident in Dubai, which claimed that he bought two iPhone 6 phones on Souq.com site, but later it turned out that these were used, after finding in one of them a SIM card and SMS messages.
Accordingly, 79% of companies in the UAE expect that cyber security will be a higher priority during the next two years. To deal with these challenges, 80% of the companies have implemented training programs for creating or improving knowledge in the field of cyber security among their employees and 96% of managers believe that it is important to examine these employees after training.
However a study published on May 11th revealed that only 29% of managers in the Middle East are aware of the importance of cyber crime risks, compared to 47% worldwide.
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