On Saturday, the first international Conference on Cybersecurity kicked off at the Tibesti Hotel in Benghazi. The event will last until 23 January.
The conference is held under the slogan of “National Security and Cyber Threats in a Changing World.” Several events and activities have been organized, in addition to dialogue sessions and workshops in the presence and participation of international experts.
The official page of the conference stated that it “aims to determine the threats that society faces in the security, legal, judicial, and humanitarian fields, and to identify ways to confront and combat them.”
It pointed out that “cybercrimes and the dangers of using the Internet and social networks have become a haunting obsession for societies. This is a result of some people’s lack of awareness of their danger, lack of knowledge of how to protect devices and networks, or the wrong use of technology.”
The conference represents a global and local initiative to bridge the knowledge gap among individuals, by adopting digital awareness to reach a safe society.
Notably, a 2018 report by the American research firm Cybersecurity Ventures claimed damages from cyberattacks cost the world around $6 trillion annually by 2021.
Forbes Middle East checked the Kaspersky cyberthreat real-time map on 22 March to identify the most cyberattacked countries in the Arab world.
Ranked 17th worldwide, Saudi Arabia faces the highest number of cyber-attacks in the Arab region, while the UAE came second, at 18th. This was followed by Algeria at 24th.
The number of threat alerts faced by Saudi Arabia rose by 7% quarter-on-quarter during the last quarter of 2017. Most of these threats targeted government entities, energy and telecommunication sectors, according to the Saudi National Cyber Security Center.
Meanwhile, 615 cyberattacks in the UAE were foiled by the Telecommunications Regulations Authority (TRA) during the first 10 months of 2017, according to statistics revealed by TRA.