Tech News
Oman team shines at the Standoff international cyberbattle at SPIEF 2024
Experts from over two dozen countries across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa took part in the Standoff cyberbattle, which was held in 2024 as part of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum for the first time. In just four days, the participants familiarized themselves with various cyberattack defense tools, tested strategies, and exchanged knowledge to use their newfound expertise in building result-driven cybersecurity for their organizations in real life.
During the online and offline cyber exercises, cybersecurity specialists tested the security of companies using a virtual state model. In this model, cyberattacks of varying complexity were simulated on realistic replicas of IT systems from the financial sector, industry, power, oil and gas, and utilities.
The defense teams registered 425 incidents and investigated 145 attacks during the battle. The attackers detected 112 vulnerabilities and triggered 12 critical events. The award ceremony included the participation of Alexander Shoitov, Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media of Russia, and Tatyana Matveeva, Chief of the Presidential Directorate for the Development of Information and Communication Technology and Communication Infrastructure.
A total of 42 teams from 21 countries in Central and South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—including the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Sultanate of Oman—participated in the cyber exercises at SPIEF 2024. The cyberbattle also featured response teams (CERT) and observers, such as independent experts and business function leaders.
Insight Information Security from Oman successfully participated in the battle with its employees performing remarkably well as both the red and the blue teams. Insight Warriors attacker team was recognized for having the highest number of accepted reports, detecting 25 vulnerabilities and securing the second-highest score, by points. Meanwhile, defenders from Insight CyberX ranked among the top three blue teams by the number of detected incidents.
Motasim Alanburi, Senior Cyber Security Analyst at Insight Information Security, commented: “The popularity of cyber exercises is growing every year due to the increasing cyberthreats to organizations. The exercises help specialists better understand these threats and how to defend against them. Participants in Standoff Cyberbattle can test their cybersecurity skills in highly realistic conditions, facing simulated attacks and learning to protect against them. Here, fierce competition meets intensive training, allowing for the expansion of cybersecurity knowledge, and opportunities to network with fellow professionals. Undoubtedly, after the battle, we will continue to exchange experiences with other teams, as this is a surefire way to develop competencies.”
Alexey Novikov, Managing Director at Positive Technologies, emphasized that in the face of rising cyberthreats and a global talent shortage, regular cyberrange exercises are the cornerstone of building result-driven cybersecurity.
“For eight years at Standoff, thousands of cybersecurity experts from around the globe have been learning from each other and honing their skills to effectively protect their organizations in real life. This international exchange of expertise is crucial because cybercrime knows no borders, and the white hat communities must not be confined within their own countries. We need to stand together to face this global challenge,” said Alexey Novikov.
Positive Technologies has been hosting Standoff Cyberbattle since 2016. In 2019, the battle took place in another country for the first time—in Abu Dhabi (UAE), and in 2020, Moscow hosted the first global exercises on a cyberrange with an online conference. Since then, the cyberbattle has been held twice a year offline: in the autumn as standalone competitions and in the spring as part of the international cyberfestival Positive Hack Days.
Tech News
NETSCOUT EXTENDS ADAPTIVE DDOS DEFENSE PROTECTION TO ADDRESS THE RISING BUSINESS COST OF WEAPONIZED BROADBAND AND IOT DEVICES
NETSCOUT® (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of observability, AIOps, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, today announced an extension of its Adaptive DDoS Protection (ADP) solution enabling service providers to automatically detect and mitigate outbound DDoS attack traffic. By extending protection from the attack target towards its source, NETSCOUT helps operators prevent compromised subscriber devices from disrupting their own networks, consuming costly capacity and attacking customers and organizations across the internet.
Consumer broadband routers, cameras and other IoT devices are increasingly being weaponized by Turbo-Mirai class botnets capable of generating multi-terabit attacks. These outbound attacks have already caused costly service outages, reputational damage and customer loss, and damage to peering relationships risking a large increase in transit costs at service providers around the world. By detecting and mitigating malicious traffic generated by compromised device populations before it leaves their networks, service providers can reduce abuse complaints and infrastructure costs while protecting their own networks and services and helping lower subscriber churn and regulatory risk.
“The combination of higher-speed broadband connectivity and vulnerable IoT devices has been weaponized by a new class of massive DDoS botnets,” said Patrick Donegan, founder and principal analyst, HardenStance. “Source-side mitigation, or attack suppression as it’s sometimes known, is a critical part of the equation. NETSCOUT’s approach, backed by its ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) and ASERT analysts, gives service providers the tools they need to detect and stop attacks before they have an impact, protecting their customers and the broader internet from the large-scale DDoS attacks we have seen.”
Using AI-powered threat intelligence and automated detection and mitigation, NETSCOUT’s ADP solution, an addition to its Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System:
- Automatically detects and mitigates ever evolving attacks through dynamic detection, intelligent redirection and adaptive mitigation.
- Extends these capabilities to outbound traffic, combining enhanced, customized detection with comprehensive threat intelligence tailored for each ISP.
- Uses NETSCOUT’s proprietary AI/ML-powered DDoS detection to analyze massive volumes of outbound internet traffic to uncover attacks designed to hide within legitimate flows.
- Draws on unique global real-time intelligence of DDoS activity covering approximately half of all internet traffic to rapidly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and pinpoint the responsible, compromised devices.
“We are extending DDoS defense from the target to the source,” stated Darren Anstee, CTO, Security, NETSCOUT. “By using our internet-scale visibility to derive localized threat intelligence for our customers, NETSCOUT can identify and precisely suppress attacks at their origin, before they cause problems locally or at their target. This capability gives our customers a new level of comprehensive defense across their peering, transit, cloud and customer edges.”
This expansion of capabilities demonstrates how NETSCOUT is applying its global threat visibility and proven ADP solution to meet emerging service provider challenges. By extending an established inbound DDoS workflow to outbound and cross-bound threats, NETSCOUT enables operators to improve network-resilience, cost-controls and revenue protection through its proven Arbor Sightline and Arbor TMS solutions.
Tech News
Illumio Named Leader and Customer Favorite in Forrester Wave for Microsegmentation
Illumio Inc., the breach containment company, today announced it has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026 report. Illumio received the highest scores among all evaluated vendors in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories and was named a “Customer Favorite” for its outstanding customer feedback among evaluated vendors. According to the report, “Repeat customers indicate their satisfaction with the consistently high quality of technical support, regardless of the personnel assigned to their account.”
The report evaluated 10 microsegmentation providers against a comprehensive set of criteria covering product capabilities, strategy, innovation, and customer experience. Illumio received the highest scores possible in 10 evaluation criteria, including areas related to visualization, host-based enforcement, product security, vision, and innovation. According to the report, “Illumio excels at essential microsegmentation functions.”
“Illumio was founded on a simple belief: breaches are inevitable, but cyber disasters are not. We have been singularly focused on one objective — reducing lateral movement and attack surface, and increasing resilience in every organization,” said Andrew Rubin, CEO and Founder of Illumio. “Being named both a Leader and a Customer Favorite reflects to us the strength of our technology, vision, and even more importantly our ability to deliver real outcomes and risk reduction, which is the foundation of the trust our customers place in us every day. In the model threat world we are all now entering, defense must be coupled with resilience. Recovery is the new defense — and the new cyber.”
According to the Forrester Research report, “Organizations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio.” The report also recognized Illumio for:
- “Illumio has articulated a vision for microsegmentation as a core element of security operations.”
- “Illumio is bridging the gap between its traditional users and other parts of the security organization by delivering agents mapped to personas from other teams.”
- “Its UI provides easy access to information that supports both access control and incident response use cases.”
The recognition follows continued innovation across the Illumio Platform, including Network Posture, which helps organizations understand security posture based on real-world traffic and prioritize risk reduction efforts. These capabilities support the growing need for visibility, cyber resilience, and regulatory readiness across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Designed for operational simplicity, the Illumio Platform combines Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation to help organizations identify, assess, and contain cyber risk across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Security teams can uncover high-risk exposures, visualize potential attack paths, and implement segmentation policies from a single platform to contain threats and improve cyber resilience.
The platform is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations, including BNP Paribas, eBay, and Microsoft, the latter of which has deployed Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation across its entire corporate IT environment. Igor Tsyganskiy, Global CISO of Microsoft, said: “When we needed to bring these capabilities into Microsoft, Illumio was the only segmentation solution that would work at the scale of Microsoft and deliver in our environment.”
Tech News
Rentify Introduces the First AI Workforce for Property Managers, Expanding Earn AI with Renewal Command Center
Earn AI grows into a team of specialised AI agents that help property managers scale operations, automate renewals and embed financial services while keeping people in control of every decision.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Rentify, a cutting-edge fintech & proptech startup, announced the launch of Renewal Command Center, the third specialised AI agent within Earn AI, its AI-native operating system for rental operations.
Today, Earn AI supports property portfolios representing more than AED 22 billion (USD 6 billion) in real estate assets and over AED 1.3 billion in annual rental value, demonstrating how some of the region’s largest property portfolios are already adopting AI-native rental operations.
Unlike traditional software that only records information, Earn AI detects what needs attention, prepares the required work and coordinates execution. Property managers can upload spreadsheets, lease agreements and fragmented portfolio information and see it transformed into a live, structured portfolio view in under 60 seconds.
Each specialised Earn AI agent has a clearly defined responsibility while operating within approval workflows that ensure property managers remain in complete control of every important decision.
| Agent | Core Responsibility |
| Intelligence Agent | Transforms spreadsheets, lease agreements and fragmented property data into a structured intelligence layer across an entire portfolio. |
| Collections Agent | Automated rent collection, payment coordination & portfolio-wide management |
| Renewal Command Center (NEW) | End-to-end renewal workflow that includes lease generation, prepares tenancy agreements accommodating tenant intel, insurance, Open Banking & payments across all Emirates |
Nearly 80% residential tenants renew their tenancy agreements each year, making renewals one of the largest recurring operational responsibilities for property managers. Across the real estate industry in the UAE, experienced property managers are expected to oversee larger portfolios while managing renewals, collections, tenant onboarding, documentation, compliance and financial coordination across multiple disconnected systems. As portfolios grow, operational work grows faster than teams.
Through Rentify’s product Rent Shield in partnership with YallaCompare, landlords and tenants can seamlessly access rental insurance during the renewal process. Integration with Spare, a leading open finance provider, enables Open Finance-powered affordability assessments and Pay-by-Bank payment orchestration that supports Rentify’s existing digital payment infrastructure. The platform will also make rent renewal seamless with embedded financial services.
Rajneel Kumar, Co-founder, Rentify, said, “We built Earn AI around a simple idea that technology should handle the operational heavy lifting so property managers can focus on outcomes for landlords and tenants. For decades, the only way to scale was to hire more people, but AI changes that. Renewal Command Center takes that idea into one of the most repetitive workflows in property management, connecting renewals, tenant intelligence, Open Banking, embedded insurance and payments in a single flow, with every critical decision still made by a person.”
Rashed Hareb, Co-founder & CEO, Rentify, said, “Property managers don’t need more dashboards. They need greater operational capacity. Over the next decade, every major operational function within the property management business will gain a specialised AI counterpart. Our role is to build an operating system that enables those teams to work together seamlessly.”
Rentify believes the future of property management is not about replacing people with artificial intelligence. It is about giving every property manager a specialised AI workforce that quietly handles repetitive operational work, allowing people to focus on relationships, judgement and portfolio growth.
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