Significant increase in cyber crime in the UAE
On February 9th, the Dubai police said that in 2015, online crime rate grew by 23%; from 1581 in 2014 t-1820 in 2015, including fraud, extortion, theft of credit cards, as many of the perpetrators of the crimes were arrested. 520 these events included the use of credit cards and various scams, often with the involvement of international gangs.
In view of the growing popularity of social networks, sexual blackmail becomes another type of cybercrime when victims are young people to people who are 40-50 and those activities are carried out for the most part by criminals from outside the UAE.
In the UAE there are different activities of cyber crime, including attacks of fraud of the “phishing” type, cyber ransomware, “Nigerian sting” in its online version, online scams and even an event reported in November 2015 during which a hacker managed to break into and steal the entire database of Bank of Sharjah and the backups. The intruder demanded Bitcoin amount equal to 3 million USD and soon released his 500 pages of bank customers’ accounts in one Twitter message. The Bank in turn admitted that its systems were breached and that it received a ransom note.
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