UAE firms deem external cyber threats more perilous

ALKESH SHARMA / Emirates Business

Nearly 23 percent of the UAE enterprises believe that their organisations have been a victim to an internal cyber security breach, while 32 percent feel that their companies have fallen victim to
an external attack, affirms a recent survey by a leading IT firm in
this region.
However, these startling findings of the survey have evidently maintained that the external threats usually pose a bigger risk to the company’s digital assets when compared with the internal perils.
“UAE’s business ecosystem is undergoing the most booming phase of its lifetime. Development is going on at a sky-rocketing pace. Everything is going on very fast; big corporate names are setting up their bases here, new mergers are announced almost everyday and innovative start-ups are also coming up. In this rush, many time cyber security takes a backseat and it leads to severe damages,” Mohammad Ali, a cyber-expert, working as an IT consultant with leading enterprises in the UAE, told Emirates Business.
“These damages could include huge financial loss, breach of confidential data and in many cases loss of long-term clients. We have observed that external threats are always more dangerous than internal ones and they always need to be plugged in on the priority basis,” Ali pointed out.
Notably it is high time for UAE enterprises to brace up their cyber security as gravity of cyber crimes is gradually increasing with each passing day. According to a latest survey by an IT-giant Cisco, cyber crimes could cost businesses nearly $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, which is four times more than the estimated cost in 2015.
“UAE features among the top ten countries that are on the radar of cyber criminals. IT companies and financial institutions are the most vulnerable entities to these attacks. In most of the case, in nearly 50 percent of the instances, cyber security breaches are because of the human errors and ignorance of the top management,” AkshayMakhani, a technology researcher and consultant with a Dubai-
based consultancy firm, told Emirates Business.
“Enterprises only need to stay vigil and do constant checks and anti-malware updates. Many times these trojans stay in the systems for couple of months before actually infecting the operations. Therefore technically these attacks could be avoided if viruses are detected in time,” stated Makhani.