Abu Dhabi, UAE: 23 May, 2024: Under the patronage of His Highness Lieutenant General Sheikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, the final day of the International Exhibition for National Security & Resilience (ISNR) 2024, organised by ADNEC Group in collaboration with the Ministry of Interior and in strategic partnership with Abu Dhabi Police GHQ, featured a series of presentations and interactive sessions, discussing a variety of topics related to cybersecurity challenges and solutions to protect critical infrastructure.
The day three sessions kicked off with a presentation by Thea Gioe, Senior Director of Training and Programs at Emergent Risk International titled “Using Strategic Intelligence to Understand to Mitigate Physical and Cybersecurity Threats”, who highlighted the role of strategic intelligence in protecting businesses and preventing cyber security threats on organizations before they occur. She noted that strategic intelligence assesses changing trends and patterns to identify vulnerabilities of organizations, allowing business leaders to enable opportunities to ensure security of operations, assets and personnel by leveraging technology advances.
In his presentation titled “Harnessing the latest technologies for faster decision making and shorter response times in infrastructure protection”, Steven Kenny, Manager, Architecture & Engineering Program EMEA- Axis, said: “Cyber security is the number one challenge that organizations face today, so it is important for organizations to elevate cyber security through supply chain diligence to protect critical infrastructure, particularly with a 300% increase in the number of IOT devises suffering a cyber-attack.”
For his part, Bassel Zaraaneh, CEO, Aligned Edges, presented on “Securing smart cities” and highlighted that to secure smart cities and prevent cyber-attacks, it is imperative that we focus on infrastructure, not only on solutions. Securing smart cities requires a combination of advanced technologies and proactive measures and collaboration among government, technology companies and cities is essential to ensure secure and sustainable smart city environment.
In her presentation titled “Quantum key distribution for quantum secure communications”, Dr Sana Amairi-Pyka, Lead Scientist – Quantum Communications Quantum Research Centre at Technology Innovation Institute (TII), outlined research lines and products in quantum communications, world market demand and opportunities in the area and examples of deployment strategies for global coverage of Quantum key distribution (QKD) networks. She noted that quantum keys enhances existing information security infrastructure as the key is secure against eavesdropping and cannot be broken even with quantum computers.
Dr. Yury Kurochkin, Lead Scientist, Technology Innovation Institute (TII) highlighted the importance of secure communications for infrastructure protection and noted that attacks on critical infrastructure are increasing year after year, and quantum era will make critical infrastructure even more vulnerable to attacks. To address these challenges, we can use two quantum-safe solutions in a hybrid manner including post-quantum cryptography which offers a software solution, and cryptography which is a hardware solution.
