CASE STUDY
Here we speak to Wahid S Hammami,
Information Technology Consultant and
CIO at Ministry of Energy, Industry and
Mineral Resources.
What are the main security
considerations in the region
right now?
The biggest threat posed by cybercriminals
in the region today is their ability to remain
undetected in the network for months, once
they have bypassed perimeter defences.
Closing this detection gap is critical for
defending against an attack. The reality is
that any organisation can be a target of
information theft and ransomware attacks.
In Saudi Arabia, financial institutions,
governments and the energy sector are
especially targeted due to their wealth
of official information and personal
data. Often, the attacks are extremely
sophisticated and specifically targeted to
increase the chances of success.
Organisations in these industries need to
invest in solutions that efficiently detect and
respond to advanced attackers that breach
their traditional security controls. Moreover,
we in the Ministry of Energy, Industry and
Mineral Resources are one of the highest
Ray Kafity, Vice
President, META,
Attivo Networks
DECEPTION TECHNOLOGY HAS
BEEN CRITICAL FOR MITIGATING
THE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH THESE
TARGETED ATTACKS.
targeted agencies in the kingdom, due to
multiple factors such as government data,
energy, and minerals etc.
How are you aiming to overcome
these cybersecurity arrangements?
Our aim is to detect attacks at an early
stage to break the cycle and implement
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INTELLIGENTCIO
an effective actionable response. New
technologies like deception-based threat
detection are one of the techniques and
investments we adopted to close the security
gap and strengthen our overall defences.
We chose the Attivo Networks ThreatDefend
solution because it easily aligns with our
business processes and other security controls
to equip the ministry with post-breach early
threat detection, accelerated cyber incident
response and vulnerability visibility for attack
prevention, thereby providing an additional
and essential line of defence.
Is there one security threat you are
particularly concerned about?
We are particularly concerned about
targeted attacks, which are growing more
sophisticated and numerous with every
passing day. The energy sector is among the
top five most targeted industries globally,
and many organisations in this sector fear
disruptive attacks regardless of whether they
originate internally or externally.
Deception Technology has been critical for
mitigating the risks associated with these
targeted attacks and has provided early and
accurate detection so that we can promptly
remediate in-network threats. n
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