McAfee has opened its first Cyber Defence Centre (CDC) in Dubai to offer incident response support, assessments and security education to customers across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.
The launch of the CDC, McAfee’s first worldwide, has come at the right time for the region, as businesses have witnessed numerous newsworthy attacks during the past year, and it is expected that the CDC will be an additional tool to help protect EMEA from emerging threats as they manifest. The governments in the region have been investing heavily in new solutions to prevent and minimise the impact of attacks and McAfee’s CDC will be working closely with key stakeholders to look for ways to improve protection.
The constantly evolving threat landscape has driven demand for sophisticated security services with strong skills and experience in the EMEA market. The centre will not only aim to provide quality Emergency Incident Response and Forensics services (supported by the new McAfee state-of-the-art forensics lab based in Dubai), but will also provide unique strategic services differentiating McAfee from others in the region, including: Contextual Threat Intelligence, Open Source Intelligence Investigations, DDos Defence Assessments, Digital Forensics and Targeted Malware Threat Analysis.
McAfee’s portfolio of strategic services will continue to evolve to respond to the ever-changing threat landscape to help customers stay ten steps ahead of the ‘bad guys’. The CDC team comprises of expert consultants, with more than 70 years combined experience in incident response handling across the public and private sector.
The opening of this centre means McAfee now has a significant presence in EMEA enabling it to guide enterprises on the best ways to protect assets and maximize business goals through maintaining a strong security posture.
Ayman Al-Issa, digital oilfields cyber security advisor, said: "McAfee’s elite presence in the region enables customers to have a connected approach to cyber security.
"The local, on-the-ground presence provided by the CDC will make it easier for all entities to take advantage of McAfee’s expertise and also reduce response time in the event of a crisis of any kind. McAfee once again shows leadership and solution differentiation with the opening of this new centre."
Gert-Jan Schenk, president, McAfee EMEA, said: "The rising frequency of outages due to hacktivist, criminal and terrorist activities has brought the security issue front of mind.
"Organisations must be able to deal with these attacks to minimise their impact. It is here the CDC can play an invaluable role when a crisis occurs by providing expert, experienced support through leveraging the McAfee ecosystem: Support, Labs, and Professional Services."
Over the last year, a tremendous increase has been detected in malware and attacks targeted at EMEA organisations. As an example, Ukraine and Belarus both experienced an increase in spam of more than 200 per cent in Q2 2013. In the Middle East, the CDC is monitoring a family of financial-data-stealing malware, which is very active in countries like KSA, UAE and Qatar.
Many of the breaches that were investigated over the past months started with attackers executing a SQL-injection into clients’ websites and databases to enter further into the network. More and more activity is monitored as well with regards to hacking groups that are targeting industries, governments or other hacker-groups for different motives: financial gain, hacktivism or stealing intellectual property.
