Saudi Arabia’s Sirar by STC blocks 14m catfishing emails during 2020

Sirar, the cybersecurity company and a subsidiary of stc Group, revealed that it has blocked more than 71,000 cyber-attacks and 14m fraudulent “phishing” emails since the beginning of 2020.

Last January, stc launched “sirar,” a technical arm in the field of cybersecurity, to support its strategy for growth along new paths and enable digital transformations, as well as to meet the growing demand for digital services and keep up with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 goals, particularly in light of the exceptional circumstances surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.

Saudi Arabia ranks 37th among the countries most targeted by cyber-attacks, which has led many companies and government sectors to resort to digital solutions in order to maintain business workflow.

“sirar”, which targets the public sector, companies and SME, provides advanced services and solutions.

“sirar” recently signed a strategic agreement with Telefonica and aims at exchanging knowledge, adopting the best practices in the field of cybersecurity management, exchanging proactive information for cyber threats and attacks, as well as cooperating in the field of services and integrated in the technical solutions of the cloud services, the internet, and big data.

Last year, there were almost a million phishing attempts detected by Kaspersky in Saudi Arabia in the second quarter of 2020. Kaspersky’s spam and phishing report for Q2 said its systems detected 973,061 phishing attacks in the kingdom in the three months.

Read: Saudi Arabia led GCC in number of phishing attacks in Q2: Kaspersky report

According to a recent report on the cost of phishing were revealed by Proofpoint and the Ponemon Institute. The findings revealed that the cost of phishing attacks has nearly tripled in the last six years, with major US firms losing an average of $14.8 per year (or $1,500 per employee), up from $3.8m in 2015.

Read: Phishing attacks cost US businesses $14.8m annually: Ponemon Institute

Other key findings from the 2021 cost of phishing report include loss of productivity which is one of phishing’s costliest outcomes. This equates to 63,343 lost hours per year in a typical US business of 9,567 employees. Due to phishing scams, each employee wastes an average of seven hours each year, up from four hours in 2015.