Amongst others Saudi Arabia steps up its Cyber capabilities
Middle-East has the history of erupting critical Cyber threats given the insecure volatile environment in the region. In the light of the given threat circumstances almost all countries of the region are in the race to become better equipped with both offensive and defensive Cyber capabilities.
Where countries like Iran and Israel have been able to develop such capabilities within the boundaries of the country, many others like Egypt, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have been building it in association with foreign actors.
For instance, Qatar is supported by Turkey, US-based Global Risk Advisors (GRA), Candiru and Italy’s Hacking Team while UAE is supported by Israeli firm NSO Group, Bulgaria’s Circles, and Baltimore’s Cyber Point and Saudi Arabia was supported by Germany’s Gamma International and Israeli NSO Group. Bahrain too was supported by Italy’s Hacking Team and Egypt by Chinese interception company Privis Technology for Cyber assistance.
Saudi Arabia too is taking various steps to enhance its Cyber capabilities among other regional giants in the MENA region. With the mounting transformation in the digital sector, Saudi Arabia too has recognized the importance of a robust Cyber security set-up and accordingly has imbibed enhancing it in its Vision of 2030.
Marking Saudi Arabia’s rising enthusiasm for Cyber technology, the former head of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) Fahad Alghamdi, recently joined the advisory board of Cyber-Arm.
CyberArm is a Lebanon- based Cyber security firm which is headed by Hasan Jradi, who worked earlier with the Lebanese distributor Forequest Technologies. CyberArm supplies forensics, pentests, and security operations centers (SOC) and distributes facial recognition technology.
Recently, Saudi Arabia, eager to build its Cyber offensive capabilities launched the @Hack conference in Riyadh in November 2021. The conference was organized in partnership with the US famed Black Hat conference, in which a large number of Emirati distributors have participated including Spire Solutions (Emirati based firm which is headed by Sanjeev Walia (Indian engineer) that represents companies like XM Cyber).
After holding the successful conference in Riyadh, now Saudi is all set to organize its ever largest Tech event LEAP (a three-day event that will be going to take place in Riyadh from 1st Feb- 3rd Feb 2022) sponsored by Spire Solutions. Saudi has invested billions of dollars into high-tech funds and moved ahead with bind economic reforms to support the digital sector.
After considering above mentioned points we can see that the Saudi Nation doing its way best to complete its 2030 objective as it is greatly expanding its technology in the Cyber domain. In the future maybe it would take lead in helping other Nations (having less cyber capabilities) with its reformed technologies, and become the superpower in Cyber Domain among Gulf countries.
