Abu Dhabi: More than half of the UAE's 2.55 million internet users were victims of cybercrime from mid-2010 until mid-2011, leading to losses totaling Dh735 million, according to experts.
Mike Smart, EMEA director of products and solutions at SafeNet, told Gulf News due to extensive use of the internet in our lives, people are increasingly facing external and internal data breaches.
"About 45 per cent of data breach incidents involve theft of authentication credentials, 67 per cent through exploitation of default and guessable credentials, 52 per cent through brute force, 57 per cent of breaches affecting servers and 56 per cent of breaches affecting user devices," Smart said.
"About Dh1.44 billion was spent on solving attacks which vary from viruses and malware, online harassment, ‘phishing' messages to being approached online by sexual predators," Philip Victor, director of policy and development at Impact, a security services firm that works with the UN, told Gulf News.
Viruses
Tamim Tawfiq, head of consumer sales Mena for Symantec, said earlier: "The most common type of cybercrime in the UAE is through viruses or malware, amounting to 65 per cent of the attacks monitored in 12 months by Norton. Online scams represented 54 per cent of attacks, while phishing messages came in at 53 per cent of attacks."
Tawfiq added the UAE figure was so high because of a lack of education in the region about cybercrime.
Fred-Mario Silberbach, the German Police Department's Cyber Crime Unit's director, told Gulf News: "Cloud computing will gain increasing significance, both amongst offenders and victims, increasing the number of attacks on mobile devices, an increase in DDoS attacks and ‘hacktivism' campaigns."
About two million new viruses hit computers and internet networks in the world every month.
There are 3.5 million new botnet infections per month and two trillion spam messages a day, according to Symantec.
