Trescon's World Cyber Security Summit Raises Awareness In The MENA Region With Top Cyber Defence Experts In Presence

On Monday, World Cyber Security Summit (WCSS) convened over 250 online participants including MENA’s foremost government authorities, CISOs and Cybersecurity experts to debate on the current trends in MENA’s Cybersecurity landscape. Supported by Youth Action Hub Oman (YAHO) - the first UNCTAD Youth Action Hub in the GCC, the cohesive agenda of the conference was aligned with Goal 9 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The Summit was hosted on the newly launched virtual events platform, vmeets. Set in an interactive online environment, the conference succeeded in sharing national policy insights, latest innovations and strategies in the face of mounting cyber threats in the MENA region through powerful keynotes, panel discussions and technology use cases, from leading voices in cyber security.

Here are a the key takeaways from World Cyber Security Summit

• The conference opened with a government panel discussion on Cyber Security and Defence strategy for Government and National Critical Infrastructure. Speakers on the panel included MENA’s top cyber security government leaders. Lt. Colonel. Dr. Hamad Khalifa Al Nueimi, Head of Telecom Division for Abu Dhabi Police and speaker on the panel shared a few insights on UAE’s National Cybersecurity Strategy and its five pillars to create a safe and strong cyber infrastructure in the country. He said “The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has taken up the initiative to implement more than forty thousand Cybersecurity professionals within three years. The government of UAE has started to implement the ‘National Cyber Incident Response Plan’ to enable swift and coordinated response to cyber incidents in the UAE. He further added, “There are also strong partnerships between the government and the private sector to achieve Cybersecurity goals.”
• In terms of the UAE government’s role in fostering Cybersecurity strategies for individuals and corporates amidst the pandemic, Hessa Salem Al Nahdi, Chief Information Security Officer for the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi had to say, “The most important role of the UAE government now is to raise awareness. We are not only targeting employees within the organizations, we are also raising awareness of Cybersecurity among the young generation by creating security programs and workshops for the public with the help of multiple government entities.”
• Emad Haffar, Director, Security Consultant Team, META at Kaspersky, UAE, delivered an interesting and comprehensive tech talk on how Kaspersky’s cyber threat intelligence approach is helping organisations by tackling more than three hundred and fifty thousand unique malicious samples every day, at the strategic, tactical and operational levels.
• The conference also featured an interesting session from one of the most sought-after international keynote speakers, Bryan Seely, World-Famous Hacker, Cybersecurity Expert, Author and Former U.S. Marine, USA, on how to counter the most Dangerous cyber-attack techniques.

Other top speakers who joined the conference included Shiraj Ramachandran, Vice President of MICTAC, UAE; Ahmed Abdelmotaleb, System Engineer – METAR at Forescout Technologies, UAE; Sam Rhea, Director of Product for Cloudflare, USA and Laialy Almansoury, Head of Cybersecurity and Emergency Response Department, The Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA), Kuwait.

The conference also provided a digital platform for active solution architects in the Cybersecurity realm to showcase latest products to tackle cyber threats. The attendees had an opportunity to discuss their challenges in secure, private one-to-one consultation rooms and networking rooms.

The MENA edition of World Cyber Security Summit was officially sponsored by Headline Sponsor - Kaspersky Lab; Platinum Sponsor - Eastvantage and Gold Sponsors; MICTAC, Cloudflare, Inc. and Forescout Technologies Inc