Cybersecurity forum begins

The ‘FIRST Technical Colloquium 2019’, featuring two days of workshop and training programme began yesterday. It is organised by the Ministry of Transport and Communication (MoTC) in accordance with the National Cyber Drill (STAR-7) hosted by Doha ahead of the National Day celebrations. FIRST - Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams - is the premier organisation and recognised global leader in incident response. The non-profit corporation also enables incident response teams to more effectively respond to security incidents by providing access to best practices, tools and trusted communication with member teams.The seventh National Cyber Security Drill completes a series of national drills that the ministry began in 2013 in order to develop and improve the efficiency and preparedness of government institutions to address the cyberattacks. The theme for this year’s exercises is Defending the Nation – Know Your Adversary. The exercise is a simulation of tightly integrated process and technical scenarios.While delivering the opening address, Khalid Sadiq al-Hashimi, assistant undersecretary, Cyber Security Department, MoTC, said Qatar’s reliance on ICT is growing and Internet has got a vital influence on financial, energy, education, health and transportation sectors as it provides effective and high quality services. “There is a need to ensure secure environment for various sectors to provide integrated and secure electronic services, especially with the unrestricted nature of cyberspace, which may offer some tendentious opportunities to penetrate the data of individuals and companies and harm them,” he said.The MoTC official laid stress on Qatar’s efforts to address various challenges prevailing in cyber domain along with the emerging threats. “The National Cyber Security Strategy has been developed by the National Information Security Committee to provide a governance structure to address cyber security issues collectively at the highest levels of government. The objectives of the strategy could be achieved by sharing timely information, co-operating and taking action as well as the development and refinement of the skills of national cadres in the field of cyber security. The MoTC annually organises a national cyber security exercise as part of the efforts to achieve the goals,” al-Hashimi said the programme assumes significance as it coincides the celebrations of National Day that will be held on December 18.The key objective of the cyber drill is to educate the participants about the importance of understanding the threats in context of the threat actors. Further, it helps the participants understand how to evaluate and analyse credible and needful information from the plethora of threat intelligence reports that are produced and circulated. The event sheds light on various topics including cyber threat intelligence, insider threat, cyber threat modelling, intrusion clustering and analysis, state sponsor attack case study, machine learning for incident response and threat intelligence, open source intelligence tools and automated incident response. William Bowman, CEO, CybernetIQ USA, highlighted that the networks have shifted and changed due to the increased use of mobile devices and IoT devices. He said that they bring a new complexity to the current threat perspective. Dr Serge Droz, chairman, FIRST, highlighted the importance of bringing all stakeholders together to protect the data and users.