DOHA: Phishing may no longer pose a threat to Internet users in the Middle East but a global cyber security company has particularly warned financial institutions that it is likely that fraudsters may use some other forms of attacks with ATM and Internet as their prime targets.
Paladion Networks, a global company that works on information risk management with footprint in 30 countries worldwide including the Middle East, based this warning from their latest ‘Threat Intelligence Report’ with a special focus on the Middle East. The report is based on research by Paladion Labs, the research wing of Paladion Networks, over the year 2011.
Paladion has been operating in the region for over eight years and has offices in the Qatar, UAE, KSA, and Oman. In the Middle East, Paladion services over 105 customers in banking, telecom and government sectors. Paladion serves eight out of top 10 telecom companies and 20 out top 25 banks in the region.
Firosh Ummer, Executive Director of Paladion Networks said with phishing as a threat is reducing its fizz, there is likely to be some other forms of attack to replace phishing in near future, and financial institutions in the region have to gear up other fraud management measures to protect Internet and ATM channels.
He, however, said phishing as an attack form has gone down in the region last year.
“On an average, a bank would have faced around 400-500 phishing incidents last year and the average victim per attack was around 10-15 end consumers. While monetary losses from phishing can be absorbed by the banks, the impact on reputation and customer trust is higher.”
Rajat Mohanty, CEO of Paladion Networks said their conclusions are based on first-hand experience of working in the Middle East with local and multi-national companies from various industry sectors.
According to the report, the information security threat landscape within enterprises is shifting with changing times and the measures to deal with them are expanding.
Overall, while threats are getting more financially motivated and targeted on applications, organisations have lower level of monitoring and higher vulnerabilities on application level which also stay open for much longer compared to network level.
Ummer said given the dominance of certain geographies in attack sources, a differentiated security monitoring strategy with geo-mapping tools can be of value to organisations.
As for the external attacks in the Middle East region, Paladion data shows that on an average, larger organizations face 50 intrusion attempts per month from outside the organisation.
Paladion’s information risk management solutions have been awarded by Asian Banker, Red Herrings, and Financial Insights. Visit www.paladion.net for more information.
The Peninsula
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