More than 430 thousand cyberattack attempts within the Omani cyberspace and more than 71 thousand cyberattacks against websites in Oman, this was announced during the National Cybersecurity drill that started yesterday .
The drill was organised by the Information Technology Authority (ITA), represented by the Oman National CERT, and held in Kempinski Hotel, Al-Mouj Muscat on September 9-11. The event , under the topic of “Malware and Dark Web”, hosted more than 72 government entities and critical infrastructure sectors such as banks, utilities, transport, logistics and oil and gas.
The drill aims to evaluate the readiness of cybersecurity response teams of the participating organisations and develop national capabilities and skills in this area.
The drill is a practical simulation of real-world cybersecurity incidents by using simulated scenarios based on the most common security threats and attacks nationally and worldwide. The drill will discuss several topics such as crypto-currency mining malware, phishing attacks, interactive protection simulation and dark web.
Malicious software (Malware)
In her speech representing ITA, Aziza Sultan al Rashdi (director of Professional Cybersecurity Services of the Oman National CERT) highlighted the importance of having the malware and dark web as the main topic of this year’s drill agenda saying “the importance of the 5th drill comes as a response to the increased level and complexity of cyberattacks worldwide, specifically the malware and the related usage of cryptocurrency, in addition to the criminal activities over the dark web including the crimes of selling computer viruses, spyware, and hacking software.” She also discussed the impact of this type of software saying, “Malware is considered as one of the highest risks in technology worldwide because of its high probability of occurrence and high impact as well, according to this year annual report by the World Economic Forum.”
“The report also refers to the negative impact of malware on economical levels. According to Kaspersky latest research, it indicates a 7 per cent increase in the number of financially affected users due to malware in the first half of 2019 compared to the same period last year, and a 31 per cent of malware infection rate, as double the infection percentage in 2018,” she further added.
Aziza al Rashdi introduced some of the statistics about Oman National CERT, which shows that the centre handled 1,839 security incident in 2017 compared to 1,744 in 2016 and 2,334 successfully handled security incidents in 2018.
The statistics also show 432,978 cyberattack attempts discovered during last year within the Omani cyberspace, 71,472 cyberattacks against websites in Oman, and 203 malware captured by the antimalware systems.
Preventive measures play an important role in handling cybersecurity threats, Al Rashdi said, “Increasing readiness does not only include responding to occurred incidents but also include the measures that can prevent the incident in the first place and reduce the impact in case it happened.”
“We encourage all entities to follow and implement security policies, frameworks, and other security announcements about threats and vulnerability issued by Oman National CERT,” she went on.
“The centre has issued more than 340 security threat announcements last year, which helped to handle several operating system vulnerabilities. The announcements were issued several months before the attacks to avoid what could have been exploited by attackers,” she added.
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