Hadi Jaafarawi, the Managing Director for the Middle East at Qualys, says visitors to the Qualys booth will get a chance to speak with our technical experts about our full solution portfolio

Are you participating in GISEC 2022?
Yes – we will be at GISEC at stand C47

What is your theme of participation at the event?
Our theme for GISEC 2022 is “Securing Your Digital Transformation with Cybersecurity Automation”

What is the general agenda / planned list of activities at the event?
At GISEC 2022, we will showcase our latest innovations and offer 30-day trials to interested delegates. A key message for us this year will be the benefits of automation within the cybersecurity function.

Visitors to the Qualys booth will get a chance to speak with our technical experts about our full solution portfolio, including:

1. Qualys Cybersecurity Asset Management (CSAM) — an asset management solution that enables security teams to reduce the ‘threat debt’ by continuously inventorying assets, applying business criticality and risk context, detecting security gaps like unauthorized or EOL software, and responding with appropriate actions to mitigate risk.
2. Qualys Vulnerability Management Detection and Response (VMDR) — a single-console platform for the discovery, assessment, prioritization, and patching of critical vulnerabilities in real-time, across global hybrid-IT landscapes. This year, we will be highlighting VMDR’s recently added Advanced Remediation capability, which allows organizations to fix asset misconfigurations, patch operating systems, and third-party applications, and deploy custom software.
3. Qualys Context XDR — the industry’s first context-aware XDR solution that combines rich asset inventory and vulnerability context, network, and endpoint telemetry from Qualys sensors, along with high-quality threat intelligence and third-party log data to identify threats quickly and reduce alert fatigue.

What according to you are the challenges faced by CISOs and Cybersecurity experts today?
Regional media outlets have catalogued a sharp surge in cyberattacks since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first half of 2021, malware attacks across the Middle East were up almost 17% on the year-earlier period. Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, and Qatar were among the hardest hit and Oman alone saw a 67% increase in incidents.

As organisations continue to accelerate their digital transformation journeys, they must adapt their threat postures to cover newly adopted technologies and methodologies such as containers, DevOps, mobility, IoT, OT, and cloud, while maintaining their traditional data centers.

Will you be running any offline/online engagements alongside the event?
Tarek Naja, security architect for the Middle East at Qualys will give a talk on GISEC’s Dark Stage focused on Azure Active Directory Hacking. The session will cover the main methods used by threat actors to perform reconnaissance, get a foothold, maintain access, escalate privileges, and pivot between on-prem and the cloud.