Senior Security Consultant, Middle East, Bahaa Hudairi (left), and McAfee Strategic Security Foundstone Services Head of Incident Response Forensics EMEA, Christiaan Beek, during IDC IT Security Roadshow 2013 at Grand Hyatt Hotel in Doha yesterday. Kammutty VP
By Azmat Haroon
Doha: Banks in Qatar are increasingly facing cyber threats that target critical information, according to senior McAfee officials. The other more crucial target remains the petrochemicals industry here.
“We see in our global detections a lot of malware in Qatar in the banking sector, seeking to steal information from banks,” Christiaan Beek, McAfee Strategic Security Foundstone Services Head of Incident Response Forensics EMEA, said yesterday.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the IDC IT Security Roadshow 2013.
With an Internet penetration of 86.2 percent by June 2012, Qatar had seen a 66 percent higher malware rate in the second quarter of 2012 compared to malware activity in the rest of the world, Beek revealed in his presentation.
Although ATMs in Qatar were tightly secured, retrieving information electronically was easy, especially in the absence of anti-virus software. The problem at large lied with customers who accessed their banking data using systems that are not fully secured, giving easy access to malware.
“The banking sector cannot control their customers. They cannot make sure that the machines people are using at homes are fully secured,” Bahaa Hudairi, Senior Security Consultant, ME, said.
Following an increase in cyber attacks in the region over the past few years, a Dubai-based McAfee Cyber Defense Centre was setup to provide country-specific data on cyber attacks in the region.
The only cyber forensic lab of its kind in the region, the centre investigates cyber attacks on multiple devices through a sophisticated intelligence system that detects threats.
“The region is screaming for help. We have gone from zero to nine people in the centre in just one year,” Beek said.
The experts also revealed that a team of experts from McAfee had worked on two major cyber attacks in Qatar, without naming the projects.
“What I can tell you is that after our investigation, we found out that their database had been breached for many months. Sixty percent of their system was already under their (cyber criminal’s) control,” Beek said, adding that the state-sponsored attacks had infiltrated deeper into the system over time.
The reason why it took such a long time for people within the organisation to detect these threats was because they could not understand the correlation, according to the experts.
The attackers had infiltrated the firewalls for months but the alarms were shut off because nobody saw the correlation.
“People have the technology but they don’t have the expertise to understand the correlations. You have to correlate all the data which gives you a full picture of an attack. That’s what we do as a team; we build a timeline of attacks through our forensic investigation,” Beek said, explaining why it takes attackers barely hours to get inside a system and retrieve data but months before the attack is detected.
The experts also said that 97 percent of cyber attacks in the world were actually not advanced and could be deterred through simple steps that secure a system.
The Peninsula
