ISS World Middle East Fair 2021: New Foreign cyber players eyeing major gulf cyber contracts

ISS World Middle East and Africa is the world’s largest annual cybersecurity conference where professionals in law enforcement, government intelligence agencies, and homeland security across the globe come together. This offers great opportunity for various private companies to sign major cyber contracts with governments.

The upcoming event will be held in Dubai, UAE, at the JW Marriott Hotel, between June 28 and 30. Private Cyber participants include — HENSOLDT Analytics an Austrian company known to be a global leader in OSINT and Artificial intelligence company; Memento Labs an Italy company, created by The Cyber Group that acquire Hacking Team in 2019; UAE‘s Beacon Red, providing cyber security services and interoperability testing for the GCC member states — the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait and Spain’s cyber intelligence Company, Mollitiam Industries.

Mollitiam Industries is one of the most promising companies among them given its background. It was launched in 2018. It is a jointly-owned cyber-offensive unit of the engineering consultancy In-Nova and the cyber-security firm StackOverflow Ltd. It is also a known name providing service to Spain’s national intelligence centre CNI and joint cyberspace command, Mando Conjunto de Ciberdefensa (MCCD) that produces spyware that is highly adaptable to Windows, MacOS and Android operating systems.

The Colombian magazine Semana recently disclosed that surveillance software developed by the Spanish company Mollitiam Industries was bought by the Colombian armed forces, which has used it to illegally spy on Supreme Court judges, politicians, journalists and journalists’ sources.

History of cyber contracts in the region suggest that the offerings and capabilities of the company are much suited for the needs of various weak cyber capability countries including Egypt, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait . For instance, Indian company Aglaya also participated in ISS world in 2016 and got a major contract for conducting state-sponsored hacking operation with DarkMatter, a UAE cyber firm.

The geo-political tensions in the region make it easier for foreign companies to lure contracts by participating in events such as ISS world Middle East. The preparations of the companies and list of participants suggest that crucial cyber contracts will be signed in this event by major countries.