Mohammad Amin Hasbini, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, speaks about cyber security. Antonie Robertson / The National
Cyberattacks are rampant in the UAE, the second most targeted in the Middle East last year. With so many children online from an early age, parents must ensure they remain protected from bullying and manipulation.
Every day, the UAE comes under attack in ways that many of us never see and the youngest and most vulnerable are targets.
Despite the country’s relatively small population, it was the second most attacked Middle East country online last year, a new survey shows.
At blame is the proliferation of devices that now form an inseparable part of our daily lives, says Mohammad Amin Hasbini, a senior security researcher with the software provider Kaspersky Lab, who conducted the survey with B2B International.
“As you know, we are all using multiple devices,” says Mr Hasbini. “Every one of us now has at least five devices at home.
“Some of the statistics mention that over 60 per cent of children above 3 to 4 years old have smartphones.”
Children, he says, have better access to smartphones than laptops and computers because they are portable and because parents like to be able to contact their children at all times.
“We are living in an advanced society and internet penetration and fast internet services are available to everyone,” says Mr Hasbini.
“That’s another indication that we need to follow up on what is happening, and we need to follow up on our children because threats are there and we need to act on them.”
But it is not just children who are naive when it comes to cyber security. The report also found that more than half of UAE respondents use free public Wi-Fi, with only 31 per cent of them taking precautions.
This is particularly lax, given that 2.5 million of the attacks last year were network attacks, which Mr Hasbini says make users vulnerable to “script kiddies”.
These are amateurs who download and run scripts developed by other programmers to attack websites and people, redirecting them to malicious websites, stealing information and generally causing havoc.
Meanwhile, nine in 10 people said they trusted computers and smartphones to store corporate, personal and financial data, while 42 per cent used unsafe methods to store passwords.
This haphazard approach puts users at risk of phishing, where “bad emails” contain links to malicious websites.
These mimic popular websites and lure users into entering their usernames and passwords, which criminals can then use on the real websites.
These lures can be sent through SMS, email, social networking sites and any other form of contact. “These are very active and very dynamic,” says Mr Hasbini, and “very difficult to monitor and detect”.
Another type of attack that is on the rise is ransomware: malicious files that encrypt the documents and files on people’s computers so they cannot access them.
Given how much information people store on their computers and devices, most are likely to pay a ransom to recover these files, says Mr Hasbini.
Some ransoms may be set as high as €1,500 (Dh6,035) and unless people have good security, they may have no other way to recover their files.
Kaspersky detects and analyses 325,000 malicious files every day. But it is not just computers that are at risk. The company detects 28,000 unique files a month just for the Android operating system.
“You receive a link via SMS on your device,” Mr Hasbini says. “This link then installs a certain application that starts monitoring all your traffic, stealing all your photos, all your data, all your passwords, and then these will be used in many bad activities.”
Perhaps, to those without children, a more ominous threat is the risk of financial attack. Many people use smartphones to access banking and government services, and even those who are familiar with financial threats are at risk.
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