Qatar Cyber Agency Runs National Cyber Drills

Qatar’s National Cyber Security Agency (NCSA) is testing the security postures of some 170 key organizations with a series of cyber drills.

The tests allow executives and decision makers from Qatar’s largest organizations to exercise their cybersecurity processes, national collaboration, and resilience plans. A Qatari News Agency report said the drills are aimed at determining cyber weaknesses, assessing cyber readiness, and measuring the ability to address attacks and threats.

Participants for this year were not named, but the Ministry of Transport and Qatari Steel both previously have taken part in the cyber exercises. The drills enabled Qatari Steel to test co-ordination, expertise, and response against a potential cyberattack in “a safe environment to verify, test and improve our skills, processes, and technologies,” the organization said in a statement.

The drills are a part of the Qatari National Cyber Security Strategy, where one objective is for organizations to “respond to, resolve, and recover from cyber incidents and attacks through timely information sharing, collaboration, and action.”

Cybersecurity exercises and drills are among Qatar’s requirements to meet that objective. The first series of drills took place in 2015, when 35 organizations from critical sectors, including finance, telecommunications, energy, government, transportation, aviation, and health.