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Demand surges for cybersecurity in Mideast and Africa

Xinhua, April 26, 2015 Adjust font size:

Demand surges for cyber security in the Middle East and Africa as firms in the region face thousands of cyber threats on average per day, experts warned here Sunday.

According to global consultancy International Data Corporation (IDC), spending on ICT will exceed 270 billion U.S. dollars in the Middle East and Africa.

This represents a 29 percent year-on-year increase and makes the region the second fastest growing region in the world, said sources at the Gulf Information Security Expo and Conference (Gisec) convened here on Sunday.

But although a major cyber attack on the world's biggest oil firm Saudi Aramco which paralyzed PCs across the company, lies almost three years back, "the cyber threats and dangers for big and small firms have not declined," said Firosh Ummer, the executive vice president at Indian ICT security firm Paladion.

The firm is partner company of Russia's renowned antivirus-software producer Kaspersky and has several clients in the Middle East, among them the United Arab Emirates (UAE) biggest telco firm Etisalat.

On average, Ummer told Xinhua, a big company faces 200,000 potential threats on ICT systems per day, ranging from phishing attacks to internal fraud and hacker attacks.

Paladion is one of over 100 companies from 15 countries which exhibit at the three-day Gisec congress.

Ummer's comments are in line with estimations made by research firm MarketsandMarkets which said that the Middle East's market for cybersecurity will grow by 84 percent from 5.17 billion dollars to 9.56 billion dollars by 2019.

Because the UAE is pushing forward with implementing e-governance and mobile applications across the public sector, the Gulf state is expected to double its budget for homeland security from 5 billion US dollars per year to 10 billion dollars within the next 10 years.

According to the World Economic Forum in Geneva, the UAE is the most advanced country in relation to e-commerce and mobile governance.

UAE residents can pay their utility bills and parking fines with their smartphones and they can leave the country through biometric scanning at airports without stamping their passports.

According to Muntaser Bdair, a cybersecurity expert of ICT firm ISC, the first steps to secure data and prevent the IT from being attacked by hackers shall be done when a firm is founded.

"Companies often set up the hardware and then try to add ICT security software. The better and much cheaper way would be to integrate security from day one onwards," said Bdair. Endit