Oman has third-best global cyber defence: ITA

Muscat: Oman has the third-best cyber defence system in the world, said Sumaiya Al Kindi, a media specialist with the Information and Awareness Division of the Sultanate of Oman’s Information Technology Authority (ITA).
Al Kindi was speaking in the wake of Oman’s participation in a pan-Arab cyber drill, which is being held in Qatar from March 5 to 9.
“According to the Cyber Security Readiness Index, we are the third-best nation in the world,” she told the Times of Oman. “We have the Oman Computer Emergency Readiness Centre and they work to ensure that all websites in Oman are secure. They are set up to ensure all websites run by the private sector, businesses and individuals are safe.
“We also have the Information Security Division to ensure all government sites are secure,” added Al Kindi.
Host security centre
“The International Telecommunication Union has chosen Oman to host the regional cyber security centre, which will be operated and managed by the ITA and OCERT. This indicates how well prepared we are for cyber-attacks.
“We do continuous drills for cyber security awareness in the Arab world,” she said. “For example, in November last year, we had a drill in Egypt just like this one in Qatar, where a fake attack is performed to check the readiness of the Arab countries.
Al Kindi also shed light on how quickly Oman was able to deal with a cyber-attack, should it affect the nation.
Severity
“According to our engineers, based on the severity of the attack, we classify it into three categories–urgent, medium and low,” explained Al Kindi.
“If an attack is urgent, we deal with it straight away, and the time taken to deal with these attacks varies according to the extent of the attack,” she added. “If the entire website and its database has been compromised, it often takes about 24 hours to fix, and we normally focus all our resources on these attacks, and postpone handling any that are of a lower priority.”
“However, if it is not a very serious attack, we are able to deal with it in less than an hour,” said Al Kindi. “Fortunately, these don’t happen very often because we are always monitoring the websites in Oman for any attack that might be on the horizon.”