Doha: Politically-motivated cyber attacks against institutions and government websites escalated over the last six months in the region, and many of them were triggered by the Syrian conflict, latest data from Intel Corporation’s software security division McAfee reveals.
More than half of the attacks (55 percent) in the Gulf account to ‘hacktivism’, online hacking attacks driven by political and social reasons, compared to its global average of 26 percent.
The ‘hacktivist’ attacks included campaigns against international oil and gas companies under the Operation Petrol (OpPetrol) campaign and the Operation Saudi (OpSaudi) movement, which targeted a number of Saudi government websites earlier this year.
A majority of these attacks aimed to bring down websites and subsequently defacing them with political messages or compromised them with the denial of service (DOS) attacks.
McAfee yesterday also announced the opening of its Cyber Defence Center in Dubai, which will offer incident response support, assessments and security education to customers across the EMEA region, including Qatar.
With the opening of the centre, McAfee aims to provide detailed data on cyber activity in Qatar, a spokesperson from McAfee told The Peninsula.
The company has so far not partnered with any institution or organisation in Qatar but said that it hopes to cooperate with them in the future.
The centre is monitoring a family of financial-data-stealing malware in the region, which according McAfee is most active in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.
Data show that some 12 percent of the attacks in the Gulf were accounted to ‘cyber espionage’, while eight percent were the so-called ‘cyber-warfare’ attacks. An increase in state-sponsored attacks on the Internet was also noted.
“The rising frequency of outages due to hacktivist, criminal and terrorist activities has brought the security issue front of mind,” Gert-Jan Schenk, McAfee President for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region said in a statement.
Many of the breaches over the past months started with attackers executing an SQL-injection into clients’ websites and databases to enter further into the network.
McAfee’s threats report for the second quarter of 2013 also showed aggressive attacks on users of Android-based mobile devices, with the company cataloging nearly 18,000 new Android malware samples.
The Android-based threats included banking malware that intercepts the SMS message containing the required token to log into people’s bank account. This enables cybercriminal gangs to directly access and empty victims’ bank accounts.
Another category of threat identified was the ‘weaponized’ versions of legitimate apps that steal user data. A modified version of the KakaoTalk application, for instance, collects sensitive user information (contacts, call logs, SMS messages, installed applications, and location) and subsequently uploads the data to the attacker’s server.
The report shows that after three years of declining volume, global spam campaigns have also staged a comeback. After a spike in the first quarter, global spammers continued their attacks this quarter, delivering more than 5.5 trillion spam messages representing approximately 70 percent of global email volume.
The Peninsula
