On Sunday, Mohamed Hamad al-Kuwaiti, the UAE’s cybersecurity chief, warned against the increasing cyber threat faced by the Middle East during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the sudden and large shift towards digitization has led to a simultaneous “cyber pandemic”.
Speaking at a CNBC-moderated panel as a part of the Gulf Information Security Expo and Conference in Dubai Al Kuwaiti said that with countries largely moving their operations online, it had led to hackers taking advantage of the situation, triggering a significant spike in cyber attacks.
Al Kuwaiti noted that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) alone had witnessed an “at least 250% increase” in such attacks this year, mainly targeting the financial and healthcare sectors, though he did not provide any additional details about the incidents or whether they were successful. He said that along with the digitalisation of all the government organisations, UAE’s normalisation deal with Israel had also sparked a rise in such incidents.
“Our relationship with the normalisation with Israel really opened a whole huge attack from some other activists against the UAE,” he said.
Following the signing of the Abraham Accords Declaration with Israel along with Bahrain at the White House in Washington DC in August, UAE received a lot of criticism from Palestinian officials as well as activists outside UAE who regarded the deal as a “betrayal” against the Palestinian liberation movement.
Although a variety of sources are suspected to be behind the attacks, Kuwaiti said: “We see it coming from the whole region, but one is Iran,” reflecting the ongoing tensions in the region. The Iranian Foreign Ministry and Iran’s mission to the United Nations, however, did not respond to such accusations.
Al Kuwaiti categorized the attacks under two main types—“phishing” and “ransomware”. A phishing attack occurs when a cybercriminal masquerades as a legitimate person or business to extract sensitive information from a victim voluntarily. Ransomware occurs when a hacker blocks access to a victim’s files and then demands payment to restore access.
Middle East Facing ‘Cyber Pandemic’ Following Normalisation Deals With Israel, Says UAE
“Our relationship with the normalisation with Israel really opened a whole huge attack from some other activists against the UAE,” said the UAE’s cybersecurity chief, Mohamed Hamad al-Kuwaiti.
December 8, 2020
SOURCE: ANALYTICS INSIGHT