kuwait: Turkey, Saudi Arabia suffered most cyberattacks in MENA this year

The Middle East, Turkey and Africa region has seen cyber criminal activities nearly double in the initial half of this year, according to a new statement published by FireEye.

The statement revealed that in the region, Saudi Arabia and Turkey witnessed the majority number of targeted attacks at 11 % and 6 % respectively.

Although most attacks have targeted the energy and telecom sectors, criminal attackers are presently adopting a country-national style digital attack, FireEye’s international government affairs director Adam Palmer told Gulf Business in an exclusive interview.

“And since cyber criminals work across borders and across industries, we see everything from aviation to telecom to infrastructure to be targets,” he said.

“We’ve found hundreds of threat groups that are targeting internet-connected devices. We’ve tracked five threat groups that are targeting just this region,” he added.

Speaking about the United Arab Emirates, he said that the country had a very strong and progressive approach to cyber security. “What is encouraging is that I perceive the government has the attitude of seeing security as a process. And there appears to be room in this process for improvment- particularly for dealing with advanced attacks.”

The statement advocated that in the face of increasing attacks, regional governments and enterprises need to prepare an effective and cohesive cyber defence strategy that will minimise the risk of infiltration.

A lot of governments have cyber-specific laws but some of them still have gaps and one common issue relates to attack response. “We need to create policies and legislation around how we share data about attacks with other industries and the response plan,” explained Palmer.

“There is as well a gap in terms of the notification of response. Not each country has a breach reporting setup. This is significant because you cannot respond to a threat if the companies don’t statement it,” he added.

Adam advised that governments should work with the private sector and streamline a process for them to statement attacks and receive support.

The statement as well recommended that organisations should always work on the assumption that they are by presently targets.

They as well need to establish an incident response/management service in order to detect and react to cyber attacks quickly. As well, companies have to adopt the right technology to mitigate the risk of data breaches, the statement added.