Tuesday, Nov 15, 2016

Abu Dhabi: Abu Dhabi-headquartered cyber security consultancy firm Dark Matter is planning to expand operations as cyber security threats grow, the chief executive officer of the company said on Tuesday.

“As part of our expansion plans we will be opening a managed security operations centre in the first quarter of next year that will enable us to monitor the IT network of different entities all the time and prevent it from cyberattacks,” said Faisal Al Bannai, addressing the media.

He did not give a total investment figure in building the new centre but said investments will be huge.

The company launched in 2014 has offices in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Canada, China and Finland. It has a large number of customers ranging from government entities to private firms.

“It’s been an interesting journey in the last two years. We grew from 100 team members last year to more than 400 employees at present. The biggest accomplishment has been the kind of people we could attract in the last two years. We have a team from different parts of the world.”

He said there is a heavy demand from entities, governments and individuals to secure themselves. “The industry is large and growing and looking for innovative solutions. The aim of Dark Matter is not to serve the UAE or GCC market but to become a global player using UAE as a hub.”

The products which the company is developing currently include Securecom, blockchain technology, crypto development and big data analytics.

“We are developing securecom that will enable secure email, secure chat, secure voice and secure file share. There is a whole host of securecom portfolios which we will be announcing at the end of the quarter and next year.”

Blockchain technology improves efficiency and processes and Big data analytics can be used for smart city deployment where you can integrate everything from traffic feeds, to camera feeds to electricity feed to social media feed, he said.

According to the company, European Union security agency has identified a number of cybercrime trends. They include payment fraud, the criminal use of data, online child sexual abuse, ransomware, among various other online crime activities.

By Fareed Rahman Senior Reporter

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