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Ailyn Agonia
Doha
MEASURING quantitatively the level of cybersecurity within Qatar with respect to different threats and attacks is one of the ongoing initiatives of a team of experts on cyber security at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), one of the three research institutes of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).
The project being led by QCRI Cyber Security Principal Scientist Dr Marc Dacier aims at defining techniques to determine new threats which are most relevant to Qatar and ascertain more efficient solutions in tackling such concerns.
The project falls under threat discovery, analysis and mitigation, one of the three main research areas of QCRI.
"We try to discover new threats and measure how relevant they are for Qatar and determine how we could actually solve or get rid of those threats. We will look at what is the biggest 'pain' for Qatar among those threats and then later on probably engage local stakeholders through workshops and awareness campaigns. It is one thing to invest in putting a lot of campaign posters if they are useless. What you need is quantitative analysis of the impact of what you have in terms of raising awareness," Dacier told Qatar Tribune in an interview at the QCRI office located within the impressive new HBKU research complex which is slated to be officially opened soon.
Dacier, with more than 20 years of experience in a broad set of topics in the field of cybersecurity, heads a team of experts scientists and engineers on various projects of QCRI. His team also includes two Qataris.
According to Dacier, another ongoing project of his team is on technologies related to cyber intelligence. That includes working on adding more contextual information to existing systems to better understand cyber attacks and determine how the"next wave of those attacks can be blocked before happening".
He explained,"This is a very important technology we are working on specifically on a large scale and how to build a platform that is capable of performing big data security analysis. The external information that we aim to collect comes from different places including the deep web and social media."
Commenting on the efforts on how the government of Qatar deals with the issue of cybersecurity, Dacier said the country has chosen the right approach of growing steadily its initiatives including that of QCRI.
"In terms of cybersecurity, we need to do things in a particular order and not to try to eat more than we can really chew. When you start big too quickly you have to deal with organisational issues. Right now, the QCRI team is growing and we have a number of initiatives that are working very well. We are given time to establish our name and our brand. QCRI is a brand which is well-organised and should be preserved," the expert said.
Dacier further said,"We, here, have this great opportunity to build a worldwide top level team in research which is quite rare actually in the world. We have a number of other initiatives taking place in the country which are impactful. I think here in Qatar it's more of a country of opportunities where you can really do things. You build things from the ground up in many cases. People here are probably more open-minded when it comes to building more security initiatives which makes working in Qatar more interesting."
He also expressed his dreams of seeing QCRI's Cyber Security group on a par with some of the top notch research groups recognised worldwide.
