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Cyber Security

Retailers Bolster Email Security in the Middle East

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As the holiday and shopping season approaches, leading cybersecurity and compliance company Proofpoint has released research that shows that the top Middle East retailers are steadily improving their email security measures, better-protecting customers from the potential risk of email fraud. These findings are based on a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) adoption analysis of the top retailers in the Middle East. DMARC is an email authentication protocol designed to protect domain names from misuse by cybercriminals. It authenticates the sender’s identity before allowing a message to reach its destination. DMARC offers three levels of protection: monitoring, quarantine, and rejection, with rejection being the safest way to prevent suspicious messages from reaching the inbox.

The analysis reveals that a vast majority of Middle East retailers (90%) have published a DMARC record, and 8 out of the top 20 (40%) have the strictest and recommended DMARC policy (‘reject’) in place. This is a slight improvement from last year – where findings suggested that only 30% had implemented the DMARC policy at the ‘reject’ level and were proactively blocking fraudulent emails from reaching consumers. According to a study by IMARC, the Middle East retail market size is projected to grow by 4.21% from 2024-2032, driven by a surge in population and evolving consumer preference for online shopping. Through the high traffic of retail activity, attackers are now using new tactics to exploit their human targets.

Emile Abou Saleh, Regional Director, Middle East & Africa at Proofpoint, said, “Middle East retailers realize the risks millions of consumers face daily when they shop online. Our research shows that phishing, ransomware, and business email compromise remain among the top attack vectors plaguing organizations across all industries. Amid a surge in e-commerce in the region, deploying authentication protocols, such as DMARC, will be critical to support the growth and security posture of the retail sector.”

Email remains the number one threat vector, and phishing emails can lead to unsafe websites that gather personal data, such as credentials and credit card data. Therefore, it is always best to go directly to the source of the advertised deal by typing a known website address directly into a browser. For special offer codes, Proofpoint recommends entering them at the checkout to see if they are legitimate. It also recommends using a password manager to make the online experience seamless, whilst staying safe and using a multi-factor authentication for an added layer of security.

Cyber Security

GISEC Global 2025: Phishing, Data Breaches, Ransomware, and Supply Chain Attacks Causing Challenges

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Maher Jadallah, the Vice President for Middle East and North Africa at Tenable, says effective exposure management requires a unified view of the entire attack surface (more…)

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Cyber Security

GISEC Global 2025: A Place Where Innovation, Partnerships, and Leadership Come Together

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Meriam ElOuazzani, the Senior Regional Director for META at SentinelOne, says, the company will showcase its latest developments in AI-powered security solutions, reinforcing its position as a leader in this area (more…)

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Artificial Intelligence

Cequence Intros Security Layer to Protect Agentic AI Interactions

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Cequence Security has announced significant enhancements to its Unified API Protection (UAP) platform to deliver a comprehensive security solution for agentic AI development, usage, and connectivity. This enhancement empowers organizations to secure every AI agent interaction, regardless of the development framework. By implementing robust guardrails, the solution protects both enterprise-hosted AI applications and external AI APIs, preventing sensitive data exfiltration through business logic abuse and ensuring regulatory compliance.

There is no AI without APIs, and the rapid growth of agentic AI applications has amplified concerns about securing sensitive data during their interactions. These AI-driven exchanges can inadvertently expose internal systems, create significant vulnerabilities, and jeopardize valuable data assets. Recognising this critical challenge, Cequence has expanded its UAP platform, introducing an enhanced security layer to govern interactions between AI agents and backend services specifically. This new layer of security enables customers to detect and prevent AI bots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and Perplexity from harvesting organizational data.

Internal telemetry across Global 2000 deployments shows that the overwhelming majority of AI-related bot traffic, nearly 88%, originates from large language model infrastructure, with most requests obfuscated behind generic or unidentified user agents. Less than 4% of this traffic is transparently attributed to bots like GPTBot or Gemini. Over 97% of it comes from U.S.-based IP addresses, highlighting the concentration of risk in North American enterprises. Cequence’s ability to detect and govern this traffic in real time, despite the lack of clear identifiers, reinforces the platform’s unmatched readiness for securing agentic AI in the wild.

Key enhancements to Cequence’s UAP platform include:

  • Block unauthorized AI data harvesting: Understanding that external AI often seeks to learn by broadly collecting data without obtaining permission, Cequence provides organizations with the critical capability to manage which AI, if any, can interact with their proprietary information.
  • Detect and prevent sensitive data exposure: Empowers organizations to effectively detect and prevent sensitive data exposure across all forms of agentic AI. This includes safeguarding against external AI harvesting attempts and securing data within internal AI applications. The platform’s intelligent analysis automatically differentiates between legitimate data access during normal application usage and anomalous activities signaling sensitive data exfiltration, ensuring comprehensive protection against AI-related data loss.
  • Discover and manage shadow AI: Automatically discovers and classifies APIs from agentic AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce, presenting a unified view alongside customers’ internal and third-party APIs. This comprehensive visibility empowers organizations to easily manage these interactions and effectively detect and block sensitive data leaks, whether from external AI harvesting or internal AI usage.
  • Seamless integration: Integrates easily into DevOps frameworks for discovering internal AI applications and generates OpenAPI specifications that detail API schemas and security mechanisms, including strong authentication and security policies. Cequence delivers powerful protection without relying on third-party tools, while seamlessly integrating with the customer’s existing cybersecurity ecosystem. This simplifies management and security enforcement.

“Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. We’ve taken immediate action to extend our market-leading API security and bot management capabilities,” said Ameya Talwalkar, CEO of Cequence. “Agentic AI introduces a new layer of complexity, where every agent behaves like a bidirectional API. That’s our wheelhouse. Our platform helps organizations embrace innovation at scale without sacrificing governance, compliance, or control.”

These extended capabilities will be generally available in June.

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