The enterprises across the UAE region are encouraged to invest in the infrastructure needed to build a secure and robust platform for business transformation and support the digital economy.   

Can they align their strategy with the business priorities and rise to the expectations? What does digital innovation mean to security, and where is the disconnect? What needs to change both tactically and strategically to build a cyber-resilient organization?   

The keynote sets the goals for security in leveraging the right technologies, establishing the security culture, and a collaborative strategy in accomplishing the task with the ‘C’ suite and board riding on the same track.   

With the IAM framework growing to fame, most practitioners are toying with the idea of using IAM to address their organization’s challenges, including security, trust, risk appetite, and managing the critical business risk to drive more value. How can identity be a business enabler in the digital transformation journey? Some say implementing an IAM framework is complex, and integrating with security is a big task and expensive too.

The session will discuss:

• Why has the strong password criteria not worked well        
• Why IAM is not about authentication 
• Framework for managing identity that supports ‘zero trust’

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the security team and the CISOs are under pressure, as research reports indicate that over 70% of the organizations in the UAE region will experience a material breach this year. The simple reason is that CISOs can’t see into the corners, which is the cause for undetected attacks. Most agree that 2021 was the ‘cyber pandemic’ year. The breaches were caused due to increased APT attacks, third-party applications, process weaknesses, and out-of-date security technology.      

The keynote will highlight how enterprises across the region are poised to fight external threats and internal weaknesses by using Artificial Intelligence to fight cyber threats and detect anomalies with actionable threat intelligence using AI.

Thanks to the SolarWinds incident, 2021 brought the focus back on third-party risks.

The third-party risk is not a new phenomenon worldwide. The ransomware attack made on Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Saudi Aramco involving a $50 million ransom which likely came from one of its third-party contractors, stands testimony to this. The attackers stole 1TB of data, including company information, customer invoices, and extensive employee profiles complete with PII data.

What are the lessons learned from such attacks despite practitioners taking due diligence that helps reduce the potential for third-party risks? The panel will deliberate on the modus operandi of such attacks and risk mitigation techniques. 

The panelists will: 

• Walk us through the attack scenarios
• Talk about the lessons learned from such ransomware attacks
• Tell us how to rewrite the security policies in aligning with third-party suppliers

As CISOs grapple with the challenge of proving themselves as business enablers, it is critical to evolve a risk management program that provides business value and enables optimization of risk profile, maximization of risk posture, improves agility and establishes effective risk controls across the environment. A strategic risk management framework is essential in defining a security strategy based on risk and establishing security operations management frameworks. 

The session will discuss: 

• How to define, maintain, and deliver effective Security Strategy?  
• Ways to harmonize risk management and security strategies, as well as security operations, into a unified value management strategy? 
• How to improve agility and maximize efficiencies of key security controls with risk program

The year 2021 stands as testimony to the large ransomware attacks witnessed globally. The industry watched JBS Foods, Brenntag (chemical distribution) and UAE is not an exception. Reports say that the UAE is the second most targeted country for ‘ransomware’ attacks in the Middle East. Experts say organized gangs and nation stages increasingly target financial institutions and critical sectors.  

What needs to change as CISOs experience increasing hacking burnout in preventing such malware intrusions? Can they operationalize technology in their prevention and incident response mechanism to address ransomware issues? 

The panel will discuss:  

• Building an effective incident response and investigation mechanism  
• How to deal with the recovery response process in the event of an attack
• Taking a tactical and strategic approach to battling ransomware and protecting backups