Mass move to work from home creates opening for hackers
Criminals dressing up password-stealing messages and malicious software as coronavirus-themed alerts or apps
Advanced cyber spies also appear to be exploiting the coronavirus outbreak
Updated 20 March 2020
Reuters
WASHINGTON: As people disperse to their homes to work and study because of the coronavirus pandemic, taking their laptops and company data with them, cybersecurity experts say hackers will follow, seeking to take advantage and infiltrate corporations.
Government officials in the US, Britain and elsewhere have issued warnings about the dangers of a newly remote workforce, while tech companies are seeing surges in requests to help secure out-of-office employees. At Cisco Systems, for example, the number of requests for security support to support remote workforces have jumped 10-fold in the last few weeks.
“People who have never worked from home before are trying to do it and they are trying to do it at scale,” said Wendy Nather, a senior adviser with Cisco’s Duo Security who has spent the past decade working from home for various jobs.
She said the sudden transition would mean more scope for mistakes, more strain on information technology staff, and more opportunity for cybercriminals hoping to trick employees into forking over their passwords.
Criminals are dressing up password-stealing messages and malicious software as coronavirus-themed alerts, warnings, or apps. Some researchers have found hackers masquerading as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a bid to break into emails or swindle users out of bitcoin, while others have spotted hackers using a malicious virus-themed app to hijack Android phones.
Advanced cyber spies also appear to be exploiting the coronavirus outbreak.
Last week researchers at Israeli company Check Point discovered suspected state-backed hackers using a booby-trapped coronavirus update to try to break into an unidentified Mongolian government network.
On Friday US cybersecurity officials released an advisory warning companies to update their Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and be on guard against a surge of malicious emails aimed at an already disoriented workforce. On Tuesday, Britain’s National Cyber Security Center issued a six-page leaflet for businesses managing remote employees.
Cybercriminals are alert to the work from home trend “and they are doing what they can to use it to infiltrate into organizations,” said Esti Peshin, head of the cyber division at state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, Israel’s largest defense contractor.
The opportunities for hackers are manifold.
Many workers are moving their employers’ data from professionally managed corporate networks to home Wi-Fi setups protected with basic passwords. Some organizations are loosening restrictions to allow employers to access work-critical information from their bedrooms or home offices.
Working from home might expose employees to lower-tech threats too, including theft or loss of electronic equipment or plain human error by employees adjusting to a new environment.
Cisco’s Nather said the new population of work-from-home employees might also be a boon for tech support scammers, impersonators who pretend to be trying to fix an IT problem in an effort to gain control of a target’s computer.
What MENA’s wild 2025 funding cycle really revealed
Updated 26 December 2025
Nour El-Shaeri
RIYADH: The Middle East and North Africa startup funding story in 2025 was less a smooth arc than a sequence of sharp gears: debt-led surges, equity-led recoveries, and periodic quiet spells that revealed what investors were really underwriting.
By November, the region had logged repeated bursts of activity — culminating in September’s $3.5 billion spike across 74 deals — yet the year’s defining feature was not just the size of the peaks, but the way capital repeatedly clustered around a handful of markets, instruments, and business models.
Across the year’s first eleven months, funding totals swung dramatically: January opened at $863 million across 63 rounds but was overwhelmingly debt-driven; June fell to just $52 million across 37 deals; and September reset expectations entirely with a record month powered by Saudi fintech mega facilities.
The net result was a market that looked expansive in headline value while behaving conservatively in underlying risk posture — often choosing structured financing, revenue-linked models, and geographic familiarity over broad-based, late-stage equity appetite.
Debt becomes the ecosystem’s shock absorber
If 2024 was about proving demand, 2025 was about choosing capital structure. Debt financing repeatedly dictated monthly outcomes and, in practice, became the mechanism that let large platforms keep scaling while equity investors stayed selective.
Founded in 2019 by Osama Alraee and Mohamed Jawabri, Lendo is a crowdlending marketplace that connects qualified businesses seeking financing with investors looking for short-term returns. Supplied
January’s apparent boom was the clearest example: $863 million raised, but $768 million came through debt financing, making the equity picture almost similar to January 2024.
The same pattern returned at larger scale in September, when $3.5 billion was recorded, but $2.6 billion of that total was debt financing — dominated by Tamara’s $2.4 billion debt facility alongside Lendo’s $50 million debt and Erad’s $33 million debt financing.
October then reinforced the playbook: four debt deals accounted for 72 percent of the month’s $784.9 million, led by Property Finder’s $525 million debt round.
By November, more than half the month’s $227.8 million total again hinged on a single debt-backed transaction from Erad.
Tamara was founded in 2020 by Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, Turki Bin Zarah, and Abdulmohsen Albabtain, and offers buy-now-pay-later services. Supplied
This isn’t simply ‘debt replacing equity.’ It is debt acting as a stabilizer in a valuation-reset environment: late-stage businesses with predictable cash flows or asset-heavy models can keep expanding without reopening price discovery through equity rounds.
A two-speed geography consolidates around the Gulf
The regional map of venture capital in 2025 narrowed, widened, then narrowed again — but the center of gravity stayed stubbornly Gulf-led.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE alternated at the top depending on where mega deals landed, while Egypt’s position fluctuated between brief rebounds and extended softness.
In the first half alone, total investment reached $2.1 billion across 334 deals, with Saudi Arabia accounting for roughly 64 percent of capital deployed.
Saudi Arabia’s rise was described as ‘policy-driven,’ supported by sovereign wealth fund-backed VC activity and government incentives, with domestic firms such as STV, Wa’ed Ventures, and Raed Ventures repeatedly cited as drivers.
Erad co-founders (left to right): Faris Yaghmour, Youssef Said, Salem Abu Hammour, and Abdulmalik Almeheini. Supplied
The UAE still posted steady growth in the first half — $541 million across 114 startups, up 18 percent year-on-year — but it increasingly competed in a market where the largest single cheques were landing elsewhere unless the Emirates hosted the region’s next debt mega round.
The concentration became stark in late-year snapshots. In November, funding was ‘tightly concentrated in just five countries,’ with Saudi Arabia taking $176.3 million across 14 deals and the UAE $49 million across 14 deals, while Egypt and Morocco each sat near $1 million and Oman had one undisclosed deal.
Even in September’s record month, the top two markets — Saudi with $2.7 billion across 25 startups and the UAE with $704.3 million across 26 startups — absorbed the overwhelming majority of capital.
A smaller but notable subplot was the emergence of ‘surprise’ markets when a single deal was large enough to change rank order.
Iraq briefly climbed to third place in July on InstaBank’s $15 million deal, while Tunisia entered the top three in June entirely via Kumulus’ $3.5 million seed round.
These moments mattered less for the totals than for what they suggested: capital can travel, but it still needs an anchor deal to justify attention.
Events, narrative cycles, and the ‘conference effect’
2025 also showed how regional deal flow can bunch around events that create permission structures for announcements.
February’s surge — $494 million across 58 deals — was explicitly linked to LEAP 2025, where ‘many startups announced their closed deals,’ helping push Saudi Arabia to $250.3 million across 25 deals.
September’s leap similarly leaned on Money20/20, where 15 deals were announced and Saudi fintechs dominated the headlines.
This ‘conference effect’ does not mean deals are created at conferences, but it does change the timing and visibility of closes.
Sector leadership rotates, but utility wins
Fintech retained structural dominance even when it temporarily lost the top spot by value.
It led January on the back of Saudi debt deals; dominated February with $274 million across 15 deals; remained first in March with $82.5 million across 10 deals; topped the second quarter by capital raised; and reclaimed leadership in November with $142.9 million across nine deals — again driven by a debt-heavy transaction.
Even when fintech fell to ninth place by value in October with $12.5 million across seven rounds, it still remained ‘the most active sector by deal count,’ a sign of persistent baseline demand.
Proptech was the year’s other headline sector, but its peaks were deal-specific. Nawy’s $75 million round in May helped propel Egypt to the top that month and pushed proptech up the rankings.
Property Finder’s debt round in October made proptech the month’s top-funded sector at $526 million. In August, proptech led with $96 million across four deals, suggesting sustained investor appetite for real-estate innovation even beyond the megadeal.
Outside fintech and proptech, the year offered signals rather than dominance. July saw deeptech top the sector charts with $250.3 million across four deals, reflecting a moment of investor appetite for IP-heavy ventures.
AI repeatedly appeared as a strategic narrative — especially after a high-profile visit by US President Donald Trump alongside Silicon Valley investors and subsequent GCC AI initiatives — yet funding didn’t fully match the rhetoric in May, when AI secured just $25 million across two deals.
By late year, however, expectations were already shifting toward mega rounds in AI and the industries built around it, positioning 2025 as a runway-building year rather than a breakout year for AI funding in the region.
Stage discipline returns as valuations reset
In 2025, MENA’s funding landscape tried to balance two priorities: sustaining early-stage momentum while selectively backing proven scale. Early-stage rounds dominated deal flow. October saw 32 early-stage deals worth $95.2 million, with just one series B at $50 million. November recorded no later-stage rounds at all, while even September’s record month relied on 55 early-stage startups raising $129.4 million.
When investors did commit to later stages, the cheques were decisive. February featured Tabby’s $160 million series E alongside two $28 million series B rounds, while August leaned toward scale with $112 million across three series B deals. Late-stage equity was not absent — it was episodic, appearing only when scale economics were defensible.
Hosam Arab, CEO of Tabby. File
B2B models remained the default. In the first half, B2B startups raised $1.5 billion, or 70 percent of total funding, driven by clearer monetisation and revenue visibility.
The gender gap remained structural. Despite isolated spikes, capital allocation continued to overwhelmingly favour male-led startups.
What 2025 actually said about 2026
Taken together, 2025 looked like a year of capital market pragmatism. The region demonstrated capacity for outsized rounds, but much of that capacity ran through debt, a handful of megadeals, and a narrow set of markets — primarily Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Early-stage deal flow stayed active enough to keep the pipeline moving, even as growth-stage equity became intermittent and increasingly selective.
By year-end, the slowdown seen in November read less like a breakdown than a deliberate pause: a market in consolidation mode preserving firepower, waiting for clearer valuation anchors and the next wave of platform-scale opportunities.
If 2025 was about proving the region can absorb large cheques, 2026 is shaping up to test where those cheques will go — especially as expectations build around AI-led mega rounds and the industries that will form around them.
