Dubai: Cyber criminals groups are operating more and more like normal business, even taking weekends and holidays off, said an industry expert.
“One of the major factors is that attackers are becoming more organised and funded. They [attackers] are operating like normal businesses with working hours and taking holidays in order to increase the efficiency of their attacks against enterprises and consumers,” Hassam Sidani, regional manager for Symantec Gulf, told Gulf News after unveiling its internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Volume 21.
He said that UAE’s threat profile has worsened in a global ranking from 49 in 2014 to 41 in 2015 with the numbers of attacks originating in the UAE increasing over the last year.
Attractive business environment
“The UAE is considered a pivotal gateway to the Middle East and owing largely to its world-class IT infrastructure, connectivity and an attractive business environment, the UAE is a commercial hub for a large number of global organisations. Given its high-profile internationally, the country is a lucrative target for cybercriminals,” he said.
In the Middle East and Africa, UAE dropped one position to sixth place compared to the previous year. Organisations in the UAE were also highly attacked by spear-phishing (an email fraud attempt from hackers that targets an individual or business to steal confidential data), ranking first within the Middle East and Africa region and eighth globally for targeted attacks.
Advanced professional attack groups are the first to leverage “zero-day vulnerabilities”, using them for their own advantage or selling them to lower-level criminals on the open market where they are quickly commoditised.
Record
A zero day vulnerability is referred to a hole in a software that is unknown to the vendor. This security hole is then exploited by hackers before the vendor becomes aware of it and hurries to fix it.
In 2015, he said that the number of zero-day vulnerabilities discovered on a global level more than doubled to a record-breaking 54, a 125 per cent increase from the year before, reaffirming the critical role they play in lucrative targeted attacks.
“The zero-day attack was massive in 2015 with at least one attack every week and this is going to be the pattern and it is not going to be a surprise. The last two to three years have been worse and it is going to continue. Four out of five zero-day attack was on Adobe Flash and followed by browsers,” he said.
Targeted attacks
In 2013, the number of zero-day vulnerabilities (23) doubled from the year before. In 2014, the number held relatively steady at 24, leading us to conclude that we had reached a plateau. That theory was short-lived. The 2015 explosion in zero-day discoveries reaffirms the critical role they play in lucrative targeted attacks.
In the UAE, spam and malicious code (malware) were the most prevalent threats as well: one in 199 emails contained malware, while more than half (55.2 per cent) of the emails were spam. Notably, the UAE was the source of a considerably larger percentage of global spam in 2015 compared to 2014, catipulating the country’s global rank to 31st place, up 20 positions from 51st in 2014.
