The second era of the commercial Internet has seen threats progress from simple nuisances, to threats that significantly disrupt and impact businesses, governments and global economies. Saudi Arabia and the GCC are not immune to the changing threat landscape, in fact research indicates that Saudi Arabia is specifically the target of sophisticated advanced threats. Multiple security trend research reports indicate that the GCC and Saudi Arabia have more then double the global average of malware on computers. Saudi Arabia has also been consistently the most spammed country in the world, and Qatar also emerged as one of the most spammed countries. Interestingly enough due to a lack of monitoring, for a point in time Saudi Arabia was also the country sending the most SPAM. This session will cover the progression of internet threats from a global perspective, and also examine the threats that are local to the GCC (including Saudi Arabia) based on multiple research sources, including the findings of the IBM X-Force® 2012 Trend & Risk Report which was released on March 28th, 2013. The IBM X-Force report announces the full year 2012 findings of key highlights that were researched by IBM X-Force. From a global perspective one of the differentiators that we observed across various attacker efforts was that by targeting vulnerabilities in cross-platform frameworks, and building on a solid foundation of tried-and-true attack techniques, attackers are achieving a greater return on exploit development in 2012.