Governments and businesses across the GCC may have emerged as victors from a battle of wills with a global pandemic, but now they must return to another ongoing battle or risk ceding the economic ground they held against Covid.
The cyberthreat landscape continued to evolve during last year’s periodic lockdowns, with malicious parties leveraging employees’ and organisations’ unfamiliarity with their new IT set-ups to launch stealthier and more advanced campaigns.
Trend Micro’s Mid-year Round-up reports the blocking of more than 62 million email threats in the GCC during the first half of 2021, as well as around 155,000 URL-hosted campaigns that hit more than 28 million victims. Additionally, more than 7 million malware instances and about 2,100 banking malware strains were detected.
“Most of these numbers are considerable rises on our 2020 figures,” said Dr. Moataz bin Ali, vice president, Middle East and North Africa, at Trend Micro, which recently participated at GITEX Global 2021. “There is an urgent need to adopt robust cybersecurity solutions to holistically combat modern-day threats.”
Innovation itself is the catalyst of such spikes, Moataz believed. As governments across the region encouraged ramp-ups in digital transformation – first, to realise the ambitions of economic visions, and then to align with the pandemic-era normal – cybercriminals saw an opening. Technologies such as cloud, AI, IoT, and mixed reality, together with hybrid work models, expanded the attack surface.
This year marked a decade of participation for Trend Micro at GITEX, and the company’s Vision One platform was its top showcase.
In recent years, industry analysts such as Gartner have extolled the virtues of extended detection and response (XDR) as the future of cybersecurity. XDR executes multilayer collection of data, from emails and endpoints to networks and cloud environments, allowing for fewer false positives, and faster detection and response times.
Trend Micro’s Vision One platform takes the XDR approach further, to include additional threat intelligence and AI.
“GITEX has long been the biggest regional technology event of the year, and it is a significant part of Trend Micro’s calendar,” Moataz said. “But our participation was about more than just creating awareness of our latest solutions; we also had an opportunity to shine light on the constantly evolving threat landscape and advise our customers and partners on the best countermeasures.”
Trend Micro announced the launch of its MENA headquarters (HQ) in Riyadh.
In 2021, Trend Micro is focusing on the needs of government entities and regulators and working on offerings that will make it easier for growing businesses to comply with their regulatory obligations. According to Moataz, the company has entered into a range of new partnerships and agreements throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
“It is an honour to serve these organisations as they continue their digital transformation journeys and form new strategies for detection, response, mitigation, and business continuity,” he said. “And we look forward to stepping up the threat postures of all our customers. We are aligned with the region’s digital visions and will leave no stone unturned in supporting and protecting them.”
Trend Micro has also partnered with Moro Hub, a subsidiary of Digital DEWA, to secure cloud workloads in the UAE, and in Saudi Arabia. The company is currently collaborating with organisations such as the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP) on various initiatives to further secure digital transformation journeys in the kingdom.
Recently, the company announced the launch of its MENA headquarters (HQ) in Riyadh, which also makes it the first global cybersecurity company to establish a regional base in Saudi Arabia. Within its MENA HQ, Trend Micro is setting up a ‘Centre of Innovation and Learning’ that will comprise of an executive briefing centre to host executives from both public and private sectors to showcase first hand cutting-edge innovations and solutions in the field of cybersecurity. The HQ will also facilitate a learning centre, that will provide skilling opportunities for graduates and professionals to accelerate their journeys in cybersecurity and information security.
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