Ahead of the upcoming IT security event SANS Abu Dhabi 2013, some of the trends in the region are highlighted.
“There is certainly a lot more discussion and interest both public and behind closed doors on the topic of cyber security,” says James Tarala, a senior SANS instructor, “The government of Qatar is now looking at new draft legislation and countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are clearly interested in avoiding incidents such as last year’s breach at Saudi Aramco in which hackers penetrated the organisation’s systems and infected some 30,000 devices with malicious software code.”
According to Tarala the Middle East reflects the wider global landscape where other commentators such as Richard Clarke suggest that all of the Fortune 500 have been breached in some significant way. “Events like Stuxnet indicate that cyber warfare is also a tangible element which is made more complicated by the evolving political landscape across the region. There are also more targeted attacks originating from and impacting organisations within the region – a number we believe has grown over the last two years in certain major Middle Eastern countries.”
The region has a number of Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and over the last year SANS has been involved in helping to organise formal, cross border gatherings to help InfoSec professionals share knowledge and help strengthen defences. “The Critical Security Controls is a methodology that has been endorsed by a number of governmental departments and enterprises and if you look at the evidence, it is clearly able to stop a large number of common attack methods.”
In 2011, research from the Australian Government Defence Signals Directorate indicated that simply implementing the Critical Controls effectively stopped over 85pc of the attacks against monitored targets. As co-author of the SANS SEC566: Implementing and Auditing the Twenty Critical Security Controls – In-Depth course, Tarala believes defensive measures are essential but organisations also need to deal with breaches.
“No environment can ever be 100pc secure all the time as applications, networks and people constantly change,” he explains. “So if a breach does occur, the course helps teach a method of dealing with the breach while re-securing the perimeter quickly and effectively.”
“In my view, the need for Information security professionals across the Middle East region is rising and anybody keen to understand a key fundamental set of skills for both defending against and dealing with the result of a computer breach should seriously consider implementing the guidance from the controls,” he concludes.
SANS SEC566: Implementing and Auditing the Twenty Critical Security Controls – In-Depth will be returning to the SANS Abu Dhabi 2013 event this March. More information is available here http://www.sans.org/info/122732 Discounts for early registration are also available.
