FINAL WORD

Proofpoint ’ s 2021 Voice of the CISO Report has provided insight into the pain points for CISOs , as well as their key priorities looking ahead . Andrew Rose , Resident CISO , Proofpoint , talks us through the findings of the research and highlights how security leaders in the Middle East are dealing with the modern , complex threatscape .

Can you give us some key insights into the challenges that CISOs across the Middle East region have been grappling with ?

The global statistics showed there was no single standout type of attack that CISOs are most concerned about . All scored pretty highly and all were in a very similar range . That really told me that the CISOs didn ’ t know where the next punch was coming from .

Looking at the Middle East , within the UAE we did see that the cloud risk was the lowest of all the regions – CISOs there did not really see cloud as a concern for them , perhaps down to the limited adoption of cloud in that region .

But when you look at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ( KSA ) it was entirely the opposite – cloud was the number one risk .

Generally , most other things were relatively in line with the global picture , although in KSA BEC was seen as more of a concern while in the UAE insider threat and phishing were higher .

We saw that CISOs are generally on high alert . They feel that there ’ s a big risk of a material cyberattack really happening in their organisation – globally that was around 64 % of people but in the UAE 68 % were concerned that something was really going to happen while in KSA the figure was 58 %.

In terms of feeling whether they were unprepared for an attack , globally the average was 66 % and KSA was in line with this , but 72 % of UAE CISOs felt unprepared for the next wave of attacks , which shows the UAE really are scrutinising their situation .

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