About 90 potential cyber threats were being reported in Abu Dhabi every month, and teams are working tirelessly to prevent the attacks against government and private sector companies, a top cybersecurity expert in Abu Dhabi has said.

With more public and private services being digitalised these days, cyber threats have been on the rise, said Mohammed Al Gayath, executive director for cybersecurity at the Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (Adda).

"There are cyber threats worldwide, but what really matters is how vulnerable you are to attacks," Al Gayath told Khaleej Times on the sidelines of the Digital Next Summit in Abu Dhabi.

"At the Abu Dhabi Digital Authority, we have established a security operations centre, the Abu Dhabi Computer Emergency Response Team, to act proactively and prevent attempts to infiltrate computer systems or any potential threats that could happen.

"We have dedicated teams and tools doing an oversight of the traffic passing through the government networks to protect them from any threats," he said, adding that the department has been responding to around 80 to 90 cyber threats against government and private company websites.

In a bid to boost Abu Dhabi's cyber security capabilities, Adda had in August this year launched the Cyber Defense Challenge - in partnership with cybersecurity solutions company Trend Micro - aiming to strengthen the protection of Abu Dhabi organisations' servers and hybrid cloud data centres.

This initiative was a successful follow-up to the partnership between Adda and Trend Micro, which signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to adopt the latest cybersecurity solutions and conduct a series of awareness workshops for IT government employees.

Al Gayath noted that Abu Dhabi has already embedded artificial intelligence (AI) as a core element of their data analytics programme, which is based on how to use the massive data generated from the services rendered to customers and how to apply AI into analytics so as to enhance services for residents.

 

 

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