The UAE Banks Federation (UBF), the representative body of banking industry comprising 48-member banks operating in the UAE, has launched its first Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (ISAC) in the UAE. The center is powered by Anomali, provider of threat intelligence platforms. It will initially bring together 13 banks’ cyber security data in Anomali’s ThreatStream platform. This will aggregate, correlate, and analyze threat data from multiple sources in real-time to support defensive actions. Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, chairman of UBF, said the organization is bringing the 2017 Cyber Threat Intelligence Initiative into implementation and the partnership with Anomali to build this platform will allow banks to get equipped with the tools and intelligence to better identify, protect, detect and respond to cyber-attacks. The launch of ISAC comes at a time when financial institutions around are facing cyber security threats. The UAE is the second most targeted country in the Middle East for ‘ransomware’ attacks, in which cyber criminals steal and encrypt files until a ransom is paid, according to internet Security Threat Report from Symantec.