MENA ISC 2021 Diamond Sponsor CrowdStrike urges cyber vigilance
Rawad Sarieddine, Vice President – Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) at CrowdStrike, a leading next-generation cybersecurity company, will once again participate at the 9th edition of the Middle East and North Africa Information Security Conference 2021 (MENAISC 2021), which was held on the 25th and the 26th of May under the theme “Cybersecurity Vigilance, Continuous Monitoring & Mitigation – Understanding the Impact of the 5G Era.”
Sarieddine said that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the implementation of Saudi Arabia’s cybersecurity strategy in various sectors, especially after the increase in cyberattacks on the country during the last few months. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a regional pioneer creating a cybersecurity vision and executing a strategy that involves governance, regulatory, technology spending and training of local resources,” he said.
“The economic implications will be significant if organizations are not cyber vigilant in the age of 5G, especially after we have seen how cyberattacks have devastating effects on businesses over the last couple of years, and these attacks are likely to escalate in light of the widespread adoption of 5G by household and personal devices as well as cloud services,” Sarieddine said, urging the government and private institutions to take cybersecurity seriously in order to counter the potentially serious consequences.
Commenting on measures that should be taken by organizations to protect themselves from cyberattacks, he said: “It all starts with adopting a holistic view, which includes an inventory of all IT assets, including SaaS solutions, cloud assets and remote equipment, then defining the attack surface and implementing control and visibility layers across all elements while increasing spending on cybersecurity, especially with the expansion of 5G networks.”
Sarieddine said the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and boosted the IT sector to unprecedented levels, and the pace will not likely go away after the pandemic. “We also expect to see more opportunities in the IT job market, and we encourage young Saudis to consider this field in general, and cybersecurity in particular.”
As businesses move from traditional work to remote work, Sarieddine said that CrowdStrike’s contribution to the protection of the remote user and remote workload has been a critical component in the adoption of the work-from-home model on a global scale. At the local level, Crowdstrike’s solutions and technologies have been adopted in various healthcare and education organizations, both in the public and private sectors.
CrowdStrike has been an active participant in past MENA ISC events with an aim to discuss the future of cyberattacks.
The 9th edition of MENA ISC 2021 spotlighted a range of topics related to the theme, such as: 5G networks, cybersecurity frameworks, artificial intelligence, analytics, cloud security and virtualization, data security and privacy strategy, satellite and communications, and human skills for cybersecurity, advanced hacker threats, and a number of subtopics, including cyber espionage, high cases of healthcare data penetration, email as an entry point for data theft, increased vulnerabilities, high-risk malware, cybersecurity intelligence, and others.
