Dubai: Don’t assume you will get your money back if you have become a target of the cybercriminals.
According to research by security company Kaspersky Lab, 76 per cent of internet users in the UAE who’ve lost money at the hands of cybercriminals have only got some, or none, of their stolen funds back.
With the variety and sophistication of online financial threats against consumers growing, losses from online fraud, identity theft and hacking are now running into billions of dollars globally a year. And with many cases going unreported, the true economic cost is likely to be significantly higher.
The research reveals how costly these attacks are for internet users, and how lucrative they’ve become for cybercriminals.
On average, internet users globally lose $476 (Dh1,745) per attack and one-in-ten people surveyed said they lost more than $5,000.
“Cybercriminals are continually looking for new ways to exploit and defraud consumers and that’s why it’s important for internet users to be on their guard at all times,” said Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, Head of the Anti-Malware Research Team at Kaspersky Lab.
He said that the bad guys are continually looking for new ways to exploit and defraud consumers and that’s why it’s important for internet users to be on their guard at all times.
The research said that 75 per cent of internet users in the UAE have conducted financial operations online and 40 per cent store financial data on their connected devices.
Drastic rise
According to security firm Dark Matter, the UAE is currently the target of five per cent of the world’s cyberattacks and the attacks have gone up drastically over the past five years.
Rabih Dabbousi, senior vice-president of Sales, Marketing and Business Development at Dark Matter, said that finance sector is the most targeted in the UAE.
“The exponential adoption of technology increases the UAE’s attack surface which is becoming larger every second. Typically, cybercrime follows money. The volume of financial transactions in the UAE, the establishments of financial free zones and the overall appeal of investing in the country are only some reasons why banks and other financial institutions are constantly being attacked,” he said.
As the UAE heads towards creating smarter cities for its residents by implementing technology to ease the public’s way of life while advancing towards innovation and differentiation, he said the country’s visibility and profile also increases across the world.
Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, revealed recently that the internet security threat profile across the UAE in 2015 has gone up in world ranking from 49 in 2014 to 41 in 2015.
The company will reveal the 2016 figures in a couple of weeks.
Hussam Sidani, regional manager for Symantec Gulf, said that UAE was ranked the fourth most impacted country in the Middle East and Africa region in 2015 when it came to ransomware attacks and 34th globally.
