Alarm bells in the global energy market rang in May when a cyberattack forced a six-day shutdown of Colonial Pipeline – a critical infrastructure in the US, which is the world’s biggest oil consumer and producer. The rising impact and effectiveness of cybercrime is the flipside to the widely lauded and strengthening adoption of digitalization in an increasingly globalized energy market. Cybercrime costs are expected to climb by 15 per cent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion per year by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. This could represent the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history. The threat has only intensified amid the surge in remote working and decentralized systems amid COVID-19. When the UAE announced movement restrictions in March 2020, the total number of brute force attacks against remote desktop protocols (RDP) jumped from 467,115 in February 2020 to 1.3 million in March 2020, Kaspersky revealed.