McAfee Enterprise and FireEye today released ‘Cybercrime in a Pandemic World: The Impact of COVID-19’ research, revealing that the holiday season poses security concerns and that organizations in the UAE need to prioritize and strengthen their cybersecurity architecture.
The findings indicate that during the pandemic, 87% of UAE organizations experienced increased cyber threats, with 83% experiencing downtime due to a cyber incident during a peak season. The holiday season poses security concerns for a wide range of industries as they see increases in consumer and business activity, making them more vulnerable to cyber threats and leaving data at risk.
“It is imperative all businesses prioritize security technology to keep them protected, especially during the peak holiday season,” said Bryan Palma, CEO of the newly combined company. “Most IT professionals want their organization to improve its overall cyber readiness. Businesses must do more and need an intelligent security architecture for managing today’s sophisticated threat landscape.”
Threats across multiple industries
Weakened capacities in terms of employee-power and manufacturing capacity have left the supply chain and logistics industry vulnerable to an attack which would have severe down-stream impacts. According to Adobe’s 2021 Digital Economy Index, global online spending is expected to increase by 11% in 2021 to $910 billion during the holiday season. According to McAfee Enterprise COVID-19 dashboard, the global retail industry accounts for 5.2% of the total detected cyberthreats. The holiday season poses security concerns as travel will increase over the coming months, cyber criminals are following the trends of limited flight options due to labour shortages, supply chain issues, new travel bans and vaccination requirements and profiting from vulnerabilities as much as they can.
Addressing Emerging Threats
Organisations can be proactive against cybercrime by implementing security measures and industry-wide cybersecurity requirements, providing cybersecurity awareness training for employees, and developing prevention and response plans.
