Security solution provider McAfee has opened its first Cyber Defense Center (CDC) in the World. The CDC is located in Dubai and will 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, caters to a growing demand in EMEA for sophisticated security services with high-end expertise and experience. The Center will not only 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 in the region, including: Contextual Threat Intelligence, Open Source Intelligence Investigations, DDoS Defense Assessments, Digital Forensics and Targeted Malware Threat Analysis.
The local, on-the-ground presence provided by the CDC would make it easier for customers to take advantage of McAfee’s expertise and also reduce response time in the event of a crisis of any kind.
Malware and Attacks Targeted at EMEA
“The rising frequency of outages due to hacktivist, criminal and terrorist activities has brought the security issue front of mind,” said Gert-Jan Schenk, president, McAfee EMEA. “Organizations must be able to deal with these attacks to minimize 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.”
McAfee states that, over the last year, a tremendous increase in malware and attacks targeted at EMEA organizations has been detected. 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 by McAfee over the past months started with attackers executing a SQL-injection into clients’ websites and databases to enter further into the network. McAfee is also monitoring more activity with regards to hacking groups that are targeting industries, governments or other hacker-groups for different motives: financial gain, hacktivism or stealing intellectual property.
