UAE prevents 34 cyberattacks against government, private sector in January

The attempts to break into cybersecurity platforms of the UAE government and private companies emanated from outside the country. (Reuters)

DUBAI: The UAE managed to prevent 34 attempts by cyber criminals to attack government and private sector entities last month, the Telecommunications Regulations Authority (TRA) said on Monday.
This number was significantly lower than the 136 incidents reported during the same month last year, TRA added.
The attempts to break into cybersecurity platforms of the UAE government and private companies emanated from outside the country, the agency noted, almost half of which were related to fraudulent offensives, eight as data breaches, three aimed at defacing and blocking websites, while the rest was carried out for other purposes.
Cybersecurity is one of the major concerns among UAE executives and the wider region for 2018, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report, after a series of attacks experienced last year that were also growing in ferocity and frequency.
Among the widely reported attacks that hit last year include WannaCry in May, ExPetr in June and BadRabbit in October. Last month, TRA said the malware Zyklon had the most number of reported attacks in the UAE.
The malware, which has been in use since 2016, is designed to launch distributed denial of service attacks, log keystrokes, steal passwords and mine cryptocurrency by exploiting several vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Office software suite.