Small Business Cyber Security Consulting in Dubai
Small business cyber security consulting in Dubai for companies that have no security team, no compliance department and no appetite for a six-figure programme. We set the minimum level of cyber security that actually holds, on a fixed fee, and we stay to build it rather than handing over a spreadsheet. Affordable cyber security services in Dubai, delivered from our Meydan base.
Short answer. Krasper Technologies provides small business cyber security consulting in Dubai on fixed fees, for companies with roughly 5 to 250 staff. The minimum level of cyber security for a small business in the UAE is five controls: multi-factor authentication on email and admin accounts, tested offline backups, managed patching, phishing-resistant email authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), and a written incident plan naming who to call. A baseline engagement runs two to four weeks. If you have already been breached, our incident response starts the same day.
Where Small Business Cyber Security Consulting in Dubai Starts
Four situations account for most of our small business work in the UAE.
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Schedule a technical briefing. No sales pitch, just architects and your team.
The most common reason a small business calls us. Someone has taken over a mailbox, a supplier invoice was paid to the wrong account, or a site is serving content nobody uploaded. We contain first, work out what happened second, and close the entry route third. The step-by-step response is below.
A larger client or a bank sends a security questionnaire and there is no honest way to answer it yet. Affordable cyber security services in Dubai exist for exactly this: build the small number of controls the questionnaire really tests, then answer it truthfully.
IT is one person, or an outsourced provider, and no one has been asked what the minimum level of cyber security should be. We set the baseline, write it down in one page, and make it somebody's job.
Staff are receiving convincing fake invoices and impersonated messages from the owner. That is a technical problem before it is a training problem. See website security for how to protect against phishing attacks at the mail and domain layer.
What Affordable Cyber Security Services in Dubai Actually Include
Six deliverables. No products resold, no retainer you cannot cancel.
The five controls that define the minimum level of cyber security for a small business, implemented rather than recommended.
Multi-factor authentication, admin account separation, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC so your domain cannot be spoofed at your own customers.
Patching, hardening, backup and monitoring for the site itself. Covered in depth on our website security page.
Filtering, domain authentication and a reporting route staff will actually use. This is how to protect against phishing attacks without buying a platform.
Offline copies you have restored from at least once, because an untested backup is a hope, not a control.
A one-page plan naming who to call, plus same-day response if you have already been hacked.
Why this is affordable. We do not resell software, so there is no product margin inside the fee, and small business cyber security consulting in Dubai does not need enterprise tooling to be effective. Most of the minimum level of cyber security is configuration of systems you already pay for.
Fixed-Fee Small Business Cyber Security Packages
Quoted in writing after a free 30 minute scoping call, before any work starts.
- The five minimum-level controls implemented
- Multi-factor authentication on email and admin accounts
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured and enforced
- Backup tested by an actual restore
- One-page incident plan with named contacts
- Everything in Baseline
- Website security hardening and patch process
- Phishing defence at the mail and domain layer
- Monitoring with an alert route that reaches a human
- Answers drafted for customer security questionnaires
- Containment started the day you call
- Mailbox, account and endpoint forensics
- Evidence preserved for insurers and for Dubai Police eCrime
- Entry route closed, not just cleaned
- Baseline work rolled in afterwards at fixed fee
I Got Hacked, What Should I Do? The First Six Steps
If you got hacked, the order matters more than the speed. Doing forensics before containment loses you time; wiping before evidence collection loses you the insurance claim and the police report. This is the sequence we run for small businesses in Dubai, and it is the same sequence whether the entry point was a phishing attack, a reused password or an unpatched website.
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Step 1: contain, do not wipe
Disconnect the affected machine from the network but leave it powered on. Revoke active sessions and change the passwords of the compromised accounts from a different, clean device. Wiping first destroys the evidence you need for the insurer and for the police report.
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Step 2: lock the money path
Most small business incidents in the UAE end in an attempted payment. Tell finance and your bank immediately, freeze any pending transfer, and verify every changed bank detail by phone on a number you already had, never on a number from the email.
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Step 3: force multi-factor authentication everywhere
Turn on multi-factor authentication for every account with email, admin or payment access, and sign every session out. If it was already on, check for attacker-added authentication methods and mail forwarding rules, which are the two persistence tricks we find most often.
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Step 4: work out what they reached
Pull sign-in logs, mailbox audit logs and website access logs and establish the first unauthorised event, not just the one you noticed. Assume everything that account could read has been read until the logs say otherwise.
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Step 5: report it
Report cybercrime that occurred in Dubai to Dubai Police through the eCrime service. If personal data was exposed, assess your notification duty under the UAE PDPL, and tell your cyber insurer inside the window your policy sets, which is often 72 hours.
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Step 6: close the route, then set the baseline
Fix the specific entry point, then implement the minimum level of cyber security so the next attempt fails at the first control. Cleaning up without this step is why the same company gets hacked twice in one quarter.
What Is the Minimum Level of Cyber Security?
Five controls. Everything else is a refinement of these.
The single control that stops the largest share of small business incidents. A stolen password is worthless without the second factor. Prefer an app or a hardware key over SMS, because SIM swap is a real attack in the region.
At least one copy offline or immutable, so ransomware cannot reach it. Test a restore once a quarter. An untested backup is not part of the minimum level of cyber security, it is a belief about one.
Automatic updates on laptops, phones, servers, and the website platform and its plugins. Most website compromises we clean up in Dubai used a public vulnerability with a patch that had been available for months.
Without these, anyone can send mail that appears to come from your domain to your own customers. This is the cheapest way to protect against phishing attacks that impersonate you, and it takes hours, not weeks.
One page: who decides, who calls the bank, who calls the insurer, who calls us. Written before the incident, because nobody writes a good plan at 2am with a live intruder.
Small business cyber security in Dubai: common questions
I got hacked, what should I do?
Contain before you clean. Disconnect the affected device from the network but leave it running, revoke sessions and reset passwords from a clean device, and turn on multi-factor authentication for every account with email, admin or payment access. Freeze any pending payment and verify changed bank details by phone on a number you already had. Then pull the sign-in and mailbox logs to establish what was reached, report the incident to Dubai Police through eCrime, and notify your cyber insurer inside the window your policy sets. Only then close the entry route and implement the baseline. The full sequence is in the six-step response above, and our incident response starts the same day you call.
What is the minimum level of cyber security?
Five controls: multi-factor authentication on email and admin accounts, backups you have actually restored from, patching that happens automatically, email authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and a one-page incident plan naming who to call. For a small business in Dubai that is the honest floor. Below it, an incident is a matter of time; above it, most opportunistic attacks fail at the first control. Regulated sectors add requirements on top, drawn from the UAE Information Assurance Standards, but the five above come first in every case.
How to protect against phishing attacks?
Three layers, in this order. First, stop your own domain being spoofed by publishing SPF, DKIM and DMARC and moving DMARC to enforcement. Second, make a stolen password useless with phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, ideally a hardware key for anyone who can move money. Third, give staff a one-click reporting route and verify every payment or bank detail change by phone on a known number. Training alone does not work, because modern phishing attacks are convincing enough that some will always land. Our website security page covers the technical layers in detail.
How much do affordable cyber security services in Dubai cost?
We quote a fixed fee in writing after a free 30 minute scoping call, so you know the number before any work starts. A small business baseline runs two to four weeks of work, and baseline plus website security runs three to six. Incident response is time and materials because nobody can honestly fix-fee an unknown breach. There is no product margin inside the fee: we do not resell software, and most of the minimum level of cyber security is configuration of licences you already pay for.
Is small business cyber security consulting in Dubai different from enterprise consulting?
Yes, in scope rather than in standard. Enterprise engagements start with regulatory scoping across NESA, DESC ISR and PDPL and end in an evidence pack. Small business work starts with the five controls above and ends with them working. If you are bidding for government work or handling regulated data, you need the enterprise track instead: see cyber security consulting in Dubai.
How small is too small for cyber security consulting?
We work with companies from roughly five staff upward. Below that, the honest answer is that you do not need a consultant: turn on multi-factor authentication, turn on automatic updates, back up to something offline, and publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC. That is most of the minimum level of cyber security and it costs a weekend.
Do you work with companies in the Dubai free zones?
Yes. For a small business the practical difference is usually contractual rather than regulatory: DIFC and ADGM entities sit under their own data protection regimes, and free zone authorities publish their own technology expectations. We establish which regime binds you during scoping, because that determines whether the baseline is enough or whether you need the enterprise track.
Can you work with our existing IT provider?
Routinely, and it is usually the cheapest way to run the work. We specify the controls, your provider implements what they are already contracted to implement, and we verify it. We do not resell monitoring or licences, so we have no commercial reason to recommend replacing them.
How fast can you start if we have already been hacked?
Same day. Call first and contain while we are on the way: disconnect the affected device without wiping it, and do not change anything on the server until we have the logs. Preserved evidence is what makes the insurance claim and the eCrime report work.
Do we need this if our website is the only thing we run?
Then website security is the whole of your attack surface and it deserves the full baseline: patching, hardening, backups, monitoring, and email authentication so the domain cannot be used against your customers. Start on our website security page.
What small business clients say
We called on a Sunday after a supplier invoice was paid to the wrong account. They had the mailbox contained the same day and told us exactly what to give the bank and the police. The second attempt three weeks later never reached anyone.
We are eleven people and had been told we needed a security programme. What we actually needed was five things switched on properly, at a price we could sign off in one meeting.
The customer questionnaire that had been blocking a contract for two months got answered honestly in the third week, because by then the answers were true.
What This Page Is Based On
- Multi-factor authentication and password guidance, National Cyber Security Centre, ncsc.gov.uk.
- Phishing guidance and Stop Ransomware advisories, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, cisa.gov.
- Cybercrime reporting for incidents occurring in Dubai, Dubai Police, dubaipolice.gov.ae.
- Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data, u.ae. Summarised on our UAE PDPL reference page.
- UAE Information Assurance Regulation v1.1, Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, tdra.gov.ae. Control identifiers reproduced on our UAE IA (NESA) reference page.
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