The United Arab Emirates was the target of cyberattacks after establishing formal ties with Israel, the Gulf Arab state's cybersecurity head said on Sunday.
The UAE in August broke with decades of Arab policy when it agreed to forge ties with Israel in a move that angered Palestinians and some Muslim states and communities. Bahrain and Sudan have followed suit.
"Our relationship, for example, with the normalization with Israel really opened a whole huge attacks from some other activists against the UAE," Mohamed Hamad al-Kuwaiti said during an onstage interview at a conference in Dubai.
Kuwaiti said the financial sector was targeted but did not elaborate. He did not say if any of the attacks were successful or provide details on who the perpetrators were. He also told the conference that the number of cyberattacks in the UAE increased sharply after the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Kuwaiti said traditionally many attacks in the region originate from Iran, without specifying who is behind them.
Earlier in 2020, Fox News reported that Iran was behind a cyberattack on Israeli Water Authority sites.
The attack targeted several Water Authority facilities and was thwarted by the authority's cyber division, according to an internal departmental report.
According to the report, the Iranian hackers used American servers to launch their attack.