Eighteen officers from the Qatar Armed Forces learned fundamentals of cyber security and wireless communication during a three-day course last week at Texas A&M University at Qatar (Tamuq).
The course was organised by Tamuq’s Continuing and Professional Education programme and held at its branch campus in Education City. It was designed to be the first of a series of training opportunities to support development of Qatar’s human capital in defence and national security.
Brig Gen Mohamed Owaidha al-Ramzani, chairman, the Reconnaissance and Surveillance Centre (RSC), attended the closing ceremony for the course, which was one outcome of an agreement Tamuq and the RSC signed in June 2016 to develop human capital and technological knowledge base for Qatar’s future. 
Tamuq also signed an agreement with the Qatar Armed Forces in January this year. 
Both agreements aim to provide scholarships and internships for engineering students at the branch campus, increase opportunities for custom-designed training and seminars to support the RSC and Armed Forces’ operations and workforce, strengthen links between the branch campus and the Qatar Armed Forces to facilitate exchange of knowledge and expertise, and establish collaboration in research and 
discovery. 
The course was presented by professors Dr Joseph Boutros, Dr Hussein Alnuweiri and Dr Ali Ghrayeb, all faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Programme at Tamuq with expertise in cyber security and wireless 
communications. 
Topics of the three-day course included cyber attack models, how to analyse and defend against malicious code, wireless communication standards, drone communications and other special topics, such as Wi-Fi, cloud security and network integrity.
Boutros, who led the development of the course, said instructors explained how new networking technologies work, and how protocols and techniques operate at different levels of the networking system - at the level of end-user computers and devices and within the Internet itself.
“At a time when digital technology for communicating and storing information is a fundamental part of our existence, it’s critical that we work to protect our information and ourselves from cyber attacks,” noted Dr César O Malavé, dean, Tamuq. “We are proud to have high-calibre faculty here in Qatar to offer their expertise on this topic to help members of the Reconnaissance and Surveillance Centre as they continue their work protecting 
Qatar and its citizens.”


Related Story