ictQATAR hosts meeting on information security in the region

The meeting is an outcome of one of the recommendations of the GCC Ministerial Meeting for Post, Communications & Information Technology held last month in Doha to establish a GCC-CERT committee. During the meeting, GCC-CERT officials and Qatar's Center for Information Security, Q-CERT, discussed the key concepts of GCC-CERT, possible projects and areas of co-operation.

"The plan is to build a GCC-CERT Center to collaborate and coordinate in handling incidents at the regional and global level", said Khaled Al-Hashmi, Operations Manager at GIMO, ictQATAR.

"We, as a nation, realize that a lot of activities are happening individually and among other GCC and Arabic nations, who are trying to protect their human assets and infrastructure. We want to combine these activities together to see how we can leverage them by sharing knowledge. We would like to see a future GCC-CERT Center staffed by GCC members that can monitor active cyber traffic and be proactive in handling regional information security incidents," Al-Hashmi added.

Mr. Ahmed Shebat Al-Hamd, Director of Legal Affairs at Saudi Arabia's Information and Communications Technology Authority, said the purpose of the meeting was to come up with a road map for the GCC -CERT Committee and agree on functions and operations of the committee.

"GCC countries have a lot to do in order to improve their ranking in the information security index worldwide," said Mohammed Gheyath, Director of Technical Affairs at UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, adding that GCC-CERT is a virtual organization that enables leaders of GCC national information security programs to discuss important issues and collaborate on mutually-beneficial solutions.