AI lets attackers automate at a scale they never could before. The same technology now powers the defences: endpoint and identity detection, watched by a security operations centre.
The scale of the problem
The UAE Cyber Security Council puts the number of cyberattacks on the UAE at more than 800,000 a day. AI will push that higher. An attacker who once needed people to write phishing emails, scan networks and test stolen passwords can now hand much of that work to automated agents that run thousands of tasks at once.
The same technology works for defence
Security vendors including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and Cisco are building AI into firewalls, endpoint detection and identity protection. The aim is to spot unusual behaviour faster than a person reading alerts could, and to respond automatically.
What EDR and ITDR do
- Endpoint detection and response (EDR) places a small agent on each laptop, desktop and server. It watches what runs on the device and can isolate the device or stop a process when something looks malicious.
- Identity threat detection and response (ITDR) watches sign-ins and the identity system itself: unusual locations, impossible travel, new mail forwarding rules, sudden changes to permissions. Many attacks now start with a stolen account rather than malware.
How we run it
At OPS IT we run EDR and ITDR alongside our managed service. An agent on every device we protect reports into our security operations centre, and automated responses shut down suspicious activity as it happens.
Questions worth asking
- Is there detection and response on every device, including the ones people take home?
- Are sign-ins and accounts monitored, not only devices?
- Who watches the alerts outside office hours, and what happens automatically before they do?
If you would like to explore how AI could support your own operations, our discovery page is a good place to start.
Sources
- UAE faces over 800,000 cyberattacks daily: how the country is fighting back (Gulf News, citing the UAE Cyber Security Council)
Full transcript
Afternoon guys, happy Friday. You made it to another weekend. Congratulations. Andrew here from OPS, just going to hit you with some very quick facts to consider as you deploy your strategies for the coming week.
Did you know that there are over 800,000 cyber attacks just in the UAE every single day? And in the age of AI, we're going to see that increase exponentially, probably five, six, 700 times, because when we use an agentic layer to deploy tasks for ourselves, we can do hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of tasks per minute. And whilst technology is great in the hands of the right people, there are bad actors who are also willing to deploy some of these innovations in order to get into your business and your data. And so you might say, how do I safeguard myself against this inevitability?
And I'm glad that you asked. Just as AI can be used for the outgoing, AI can be used for the defensive. What's really exciting is we're seeing brands like Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, bringing out all of these AI enabled defence mechanisms to further enable the activities of their firewalls, their endpoint detection systems and their identity protection systems. Here at OPS, we deploy something called an ITDR, an EDR in accompaniment to our managed service to help with the cybersecurity of the organisations that we serve.
What does that look like? Well, essentially we set up something called a security operating center, which means that we deploy a small agent on each and every one of the end user devices that we're responsible for protecting. And we get reports into our operating center minute by minute by minute by minute. So every time there is something which is even remotely suspicious happening within your business, that is in your vested interest to act on, we have automated responses that are AI enabled to close down and mitigate for those risks and issues in the millisecond that they emerge.
And so it's really exciting to be delivering IT and cybersecurity solutions in the age of AI and know that everything that we can leverage for good has an equal and opposing force for which you need to strategize for. If any of that sounds interesting to you, reach out to me, hello@opsit.ae or if you'd like to talk to the rest of the team about ideating which ways you could leverage AI and IT infrastructure for your business objectives, we've got a brand new discovery page. It is opsit.ae/discover. That's opsit.ae/discover.
Hope you guys have a fantastic weekend. It's great to have you here engaging with the content. We're gonna be putting out more white papers and informative pieces of information just like this in the coming weeks. Stick around, I promise you, it's gonna be worth it.
Let's speak soon.