DarkMatter Highlights Year of Achievements with Media Roundtable on the Sidelines of RSA Conference With Founder and CEO, Faisal Al Bannai - Seite 2

As part of DarkMatter's participation at the RSA Conference Abu Dhabi 2016, Faisal Al Bannai briefed assembled media and reiterated the firm's commitment to innovation. He also emphasised DarkMatter's desire to continue to attract tier-one talent from across the globe and produce cutting-edge offerings.

Highlighting the clear and present cyber security threat that exists, Europol, a European Union security agency, recently published its 2016 Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) research, which identified an expanding cyber criminal economy exploiting increasingly Internet-enabled lives and low levels of digital hygiene. Informed largely by Europol's law enforcement and cooperation partners, the report identifies eight main cyber crime trends.

Trend 1: Crime-as-a-Service
The digital underground is underpinned by a growing Crime-as-a-Service model that interconnects specialist providers of cyber crime tools and services with an increasing number of organised crime groups.

Trend 2: Ransomware 
Ransomware and banking Trojans remain the top malware threats, a trend unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.

Trend 3: The criminal use of data
Data remains a key commodity for cyber criminals. It is procured for immediate financial gain in many cases but, increasingly, also acquired to commit more complex fraud, encrypted for ransom, or used directly for extortion.

Trend 4: Payment fraud
EMV (chip and PIN), geo-blocking and other industry measures continue to erode card-present fraud, but logical and malware attacks directly against ATMs continue to evolve and proliferate.

Trend 5: Online child sexual abuse
The use of end-to-end encrypted platforms for sharing media, coupled with the use of largely anonymous payment systems, has facilitated an escalation in the live streaming of child abuse.

Trend 6: Abuse of the Darknet 
The Darknet continues to enable criminals involved in a range of illicit activities, such as the exchange of child sexual exploitation material.

Trend 7: Social engineering 
An increase of phishing aimed at high value targets has been registered by enforcement private sector authorities.

Trend 8: Virtual currencies 
Bitcoin remains the currency of choice for the payment for criminal products and services in the digital underground economy and the Darknet.

Picture caption: Faisal Al Bannai is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DarkMatter. He may be contacted at Twitter handle @albannai_faisal

About DarkMatter  

DarkMatter is transforming the cyber security landscape. Headquartered in the UAE and operating globally, we're the region's first and only fully integrated digital defence and cyber security consultancy and implementation firm. Our elite team of global experts deliver advanced, next-generation solutions to governments and enterprises across the cyber security spectrum.

We help clients simplify the enormous complexity of today's ever-evolving cyber threats. Our vision is to secure the future by protecting its technologies. Innovation and Research are cornerstones to our development and the activities in these areas underpin our entire range offerings, including Secure Communications, Public Key Infrastructure and Big Data & Analytics products.

They also extend to our activities in Governance, Risk & Compliance, Cyber Network Defence, Managed Security Services, Infrastructure & System Integration, Test & Validation Labs, and Smart Solutions.

For further details, visit http://www.darkmatter.ae