UAE Persistently Facing Cyber Attacks

According to a high-ranking security researcher at Trend Micro, the greatest threat to online security is pre-arranged cyber crime. Reportedly, criminals don't seem to spare the Middle East, which had over 436,551 botnet PCs, with the UAE alone hosting 42,662 of the total.

This implies that the botnet figures of UAE are the highest amongst the countries of the region. Also, the use of the Internet in UAE has increased 212% since 2000, and so 49.8% of the nation's people presently are vulnerable to online crime.

Moreover, between January and April 2009, Trend Micro sanitized over 1 million infected PCs in the whole of the Middle East while the UAE reported 187,881 of them.

Further within the EMEA region, people download an estimated 56.90% of threats online, with malware dropping 51.72% of them and removable drives infecting 22.41% of all systems. States Trend Micro that it observes a similar pattern across the Middle East.

Trend Micro also observes that some sophisticated security breaches have recently affected the region, with a rise in data-stealing malware that permeate enterprises even though they might be highly secured. Furthermore, the company says that organizations' websites are at risk while those that are targeted most are attacked through comprised computers.

Meanwhile, Senior Security Analyst Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro says that with the growth and prosperity of the underground economic world, both consumers and businesses are suffering identity theft, financial loss and damaged name. Consequently, security experts are constantly struggling to cope up with both the latest malware as well as the ever increasing number of threats originating from the Web, reports MENAFN on June 8, 2009.

They also comment that the modern threat environment is an evolution from bulk virus outbreaks during 2001 to stealthy hazards during 2008. A lot of Internet users do not even know that their computer systems have been hijacked.

Earlier security researchers at Microsoft too commented, in Africa and the Middle East, the world economic disaster threatens to raise cyber crime since tech-savvy people who are asked to leave their jobs are relying on illicit cyber methods for survival.

Related article: U.S. Businesses Lose $712 Per Worker Due to Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 6/16/2009