The Kingdom’s residents have incurred SR1.5 billion in losses through the use of pirated software programs and hardware devices, said Samir Noman, president of Microsoft Arabia.

“A government agency was recently exposed to an organized piracy attempt when they purchased 400,000 devices with forged trademarks,” he said.

“This resulted in the spread of serious computer viruses throughout the agency.”

Piracy attempts often originate within the Kingdom without the knowledge of users through the installation of unlicensed programs, a local daily reported.

“We can expect electronic warfare to be the new form of modern-age war,” he said.

“The Kingdom is considered a leading user of social media globally, which makes it more vulnerable to piracy attacks.”

“According to a joint study carried out by the International Data Corporation (IDC) and the National University of Singapore (NUS), companies around the globe are expected to incur losses worth $315 billion due to organized cybercrime and are poised to spend $500 billion during the current year to remedy problems related to pirated software and information security,” he said.

“Also based on the study, consumers worldwide are expected to spend $25 billion and more than 1 billion hours this year addressing security threats and repairing their PCs thanks to the use of pirated software,” said Noman.