Panellists at a session during the Cysec Qatar Summit 2023.
Qatar is committed to building a secure cyber ecosystem and building capabilities to cope with exponential changes. Experts discussed pressing cyber security trends, best practices, solutions and latest innovations to transform the global cyber ecosystem at an event held recently.
Under the theme ‘Deploying a Cyber-Resilient Framework in Digitized Qatar’, Cysec Global Series hosted its 5th Edition - the Cysec Qatar Summit 2023, which was organised by MAK, a global provider of leading edge B2B conferences and events. The event saw a gathering of cybersecurity experts from the government and public and private organisations from across Qatar, region and internationally. The event brought together C-level executives like CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, CDOs and IT security heads who discussed the strategies to improve cyber resilience and minimise threats in digital economy.
Qatar has launched TASMU, a unique advanced smart city programme that will transform key industry sectors and is among the biggest adopters of cloud in the Middle East region. In line with Qatar National Vision 2030, public and private enterprises have accelerated their digital transformation innovation and are committed to transforming the country into a digital economy - making Qatar a digital hub for the region and the world.
Shane Cross, Head of Cyber Crime Unit, Interpol - HQ Singapore, examined the current status on international crime trends from the perspective of Interpol. The first panel discussion entitled ‘Front-runners in digital innovation: Are we cyber resilient?’ highlighted international engagement and partnerships between public, private and industry and how to mitigate risks and secure IoT hardware, best practices and strategies for the future. The experts stressed balancing the need for cyber security in the digital transformation and how artificial intelligence (AI) is protecting sensitive data from cyber-attacks.
The panellists included Daniel Patterson, Commissioner, Data Protection Office at Qatar Financial Centre; Aref Al Tamimi, Senior Manager, National Cyber Security Research Lab, Qatar Computing Research Institute; Imran Chowdhury, Global Data Protection Officer, Al Jazeera Media Network; and Karim Benslimane, Director of Cyber Intelligence, Darktrace.
The second panel entitled ‘Bolstering security protocols to defend against the rising threat of ransomware’ talked about how organisations can effectively train their employees to recognise and respond to potential ransomware attacks and the best practices for incident response and mitigation. It also discussed the most effective technologies for detecting and mitigating ransomware attacks and how can organisations integrate these tools into their existing security infrastructure. It also shed light on the cyber security risks and advantages of ChatGPT and to safeguard against it. Addressing the panel discussion, Hoda Taheri, Head of Information Security at Snoonu Qatar, said, “It does not matter how high-tech technology we have in our organisation, we cannot say we are 100 percent secure and we have to make sure that our users know about its impact. It is about building the culture using technology.”
Responding to a query about key things being done to protect from ransomware, John Mankarios, Vice-President, Information Technology at QInvest, said, “We are trying to automate ransomware sets in our transition. Two to three years ago we started using AI based solutions and started analysing the end user behaviour by seeing the trends and patterns of the user behaviour. We started counting on more on AI behaviours in anti-virus solutions to analyse the patterns of the file and folders access.”
Speaking about best practices being implemented, Anfal Shaikh, Chief Information Security Officer, Qatar Islamic Insurance Company, said, “We need to always see how organisations are practicing security and challenges they are facing. As we are connected to Internet, we should know that cybersecurity is our responsibility.”
