Rise in zero-day exploitations in 2019 in Middle East compared to three years ago

Cybersecurity firm FireEye has seen as an increase in zero-day exploitations in 2019 than the previous three years in the Middle East.

Speaking to TechRadar Middle East, Alister Shepherd, Director for Middle East and Africa at Mandiant, a unit of FireEye, said that there are more private security companies investing a large amount of money, apart from governments such as state-sponsored actors, to develop offensive cyber capabilities and services to make additional income.

As a wider range of actors appears to have gained access to these capabilities, he said that there is going to be a greater variety of actors using zero-days, especially as private vendors continue feeding the demand for offensive cyber weapons.

“Unsophisticated threat actors have been able to buy malicious tools from the dark web for some time – you can buy access to a network and then buy the ransomware, and you just take the risk to deploy it.  We’re now seeing this being mirrored at a higher level, as Governments who have not developed their own capability, or who wish to extend their capability, can now buy off the shelf with sophisticated capabilities,” he said.

According to industry reports, espionage groups such as Stealth Falcon and FruityArmor have targeted journalists and activists in the Middle East, between 2016 and 2019, by buying malware sold by NSO, an Israeli software company, which leveraged three iOS zero-days.

Becoming increasingly commoditised

Shepherd said that SandCat, suspected to have links with Uzbekistan state intelligence, has been using zero-days in operations against targets in the Middle East.

BlackOasis, which could have acquired zero-day from private company Gamma Group, has demonstrated similarly frequent access to zero-day vulnerabilities in the Middle East.

“We believe that some of the most dangerous state-sponsored intrusion sets are increasingly demonstrating the ability to quickly exploit vulnerabilities that have been made public. In multiple cases, groups linked to these countries have been able to weaponise vulnerabilities and incorporate them into their operations, aiming to take advantage of the window between disclosures and patch application,” he said.

Even though financially-motivated groups continue to leverage zero-days in their operations, he said that they are less frequent than state-sponsored groups.

“Countries with the strongest capabilities are Russia, China, North Korea, the US, Iran and Israel, apart from other countries. We typically see Russia and China deploying these tools most broadly,” he said.

Moreover, he said that access to zero-day capabilities is becoming increasingly commodified and state groups will continue to support internal exploit discovery and development.

However, he said that buying zero-days from private companies may offer a more attractive option than relying on domestic solutions or underground markets.

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Dubai Government has 24 use cases on blockchain platform in last three years

Dubai Government has 24 blockchain use cases in the last three years and is on target to achieve its objective of digitising the journeys of the residents by 2021.

Digital transformation is not a new concept to Dubai. The city’s smart transformation journey began in 1999 with the establishment of the e-Government.

The digital transformation strategies have been led by the government and public sectors unlike in other parts of the world where the private sector is ahead and, at the same time, the public sector sets the vision and drives innovation and this helps to rally the private sectors.

Wesam Lootah, Chief Executive Officer of the Smart Dubai Government Establishment, the technology arm of Smart Dubai office, the government entity entrusted with Dubai’s city-wide digital smart transformation, told TechRadar Middle East that the blockchain strategy was launched in October 2016.

“Right now, we have use cases in finance, education, real estate, tourism, commerce, health, transport and security. Blockchain plays a significant role in eliminating the use of paper and move from manual to a fully-digitised transaction,” he said.

 “Government, private and public sectors are leveraging this technology to create seamless transactions. By 2021, the Dubai Government will achieve its paperless strategy. We are in the early days and we will continue to leverage the emerging technologies. Our focus is not on the technologies, but on the impact these technologies can create,” he said.

Dr. Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr, Director General of Smart Dubai, said that Dubai’s ambition goes beyond simply bringing advanced technologies and automating tasks.

“The emirate is looking to establish itself as a full-fledged smart city of the future, build a robust, integrated and interconnected ecosystem where advanced technologies are utilised to serve the people and ensure their well-being,” she said.

A key goal for Dubai’s smart transformation is the execution of the Dubai Paperless Strategy by 2021. The strategy aims to 100% digitise all government services, and offer these services to the residents and visitors of Dubai via one mobile platform.

Setting a benchmark

In the next three to four years, Jyoti Lalchandani, Vice-President and Regional Managing Director of research firm International Data Corporation Middle East, Turkey and Africa, said that blockchain will be embedded into the compute and that will open a significant amount of opportunities.

“The blockchain technology will be matured when you have high volume and low-value transactions. Currently, a lot of the blockchain investments happen in low volume and high-value transactions,” he said.

Bin Bishr said that Smart Dubai has launched blockchain-as-a-service that allows government entities to implement use cases without investing in individual platforms.

Moreover, Lootah said that a global blockchain exhibition will be launched during Expo 2020 and a permanent blockchain campus.

Currently, blockchain technology has no standard or protocol globally but he said that Dubai has announced its blockchain policy in November last year that includes the governance and framework that helps to achieve the standard and it was developed in collaboration with all the private and public entities working on blockchain applications using the best benchmarks.

He added that Smart Dubai has implemented the Hyper-Ledger and Ethereum technologies on its platform.

“We focused on the challenges of the implementations. Right now, there is no standard for blockchain technology and no operating procedures globally and unfortunately, the pitfalls are many. If we don’t coordinate properly, there would be duplications of work and in cases, the network may not be able to talk to each other,” he said.

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The laptop with the world’s biggest screen is still on sale, two years after launch

There’s a good reason most companies never launched a laptop with a curved screen  as often, you need ample space to appreciate the curvature of the display, which a laptop often simply can't provide.

However, this didn’t prevent Acer releasing the world's first notebook to feature a curved display – the Predator 21 X.

If you want to get your hands on one, US retailer Insight still sells it at the time of writing for a staggering $ 9,935, which is actually more than the suggested retail price at launch.

A whopper of a laptop

The Predator 21 X is the first and only laptop ever to ship with a curved display – but that's not all it has to offer.

It has a proper mechanical keyboard, a four-speaker/dual-woofer setup, three fans and two (yes, two) 330W power supply units that feed an 8-cell battery.

The rest of the tech is somewhat long in the tooth; a desktop-grade Intel Core i7-7820HK, 64GB of RAM, two SSDs in SATA-mode, with a backup 1TB hard disk drive, and two Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 in SLI with 16GB GDDR5 RAM.

Not surprisingly, the Predator 21 X weighs a lot – more than 10Kg including the PSUs. It is also very big (22.4 x 12.4 x 3.3in) and has a horrendously short battery life under load, meaning that whilst the Predator launched as a gaming laptop, it can also be used as a mobile workstation at a push.

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