Qualys, a pioneer and leading provider of disruptive cloud-based IT, security and compliance solutions, announced it will participate at GISEC 2022 under the theme of “Securing Your Digital Transformation with Cybersecurity Automation.”
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 per cent on the year-earlier period. Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, and Qatar were among the hardest hit and Oman alone saw a 67 per cent 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 centres,” said Hadi Jaafarawi, Managing Director, Middle East, Qualys. “Qualys’ cloud platform, with its suite of security applications, delivers an indispensable capability to gain visibility across the entire infrastructure, and enhance remediation efforts.”
At GISEC 2022, Qualys will showcase its latest innovations and offer 30-day trials to interested delegates. A key message for the company this year will be the benefits of automation within the cybersecurity function. Automation allows organisations to gain rich visibility across hybrid multi-cloud environments and identify vulnerabilities and suspicious activity. Automation is also a powerful means to sift through data quickly and offer real-time insights with less false positives, meaning security teams can detect, manage, and resolve vulnerabilities, leading to faster remediation.
Additionally, when using machine intelligence to take over manual and repetitive tasks from human agents, security professionals can turn their skills to more complex and innovative tasks, such as hunting more elusive attacks or collaborating with line of business on strategy and policy.
Visitors to the Qualys booth will get a chance to speak with technical experts about Qualys’ full solution portfolio, including:
- 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 unauthorised or EOL software and responding with appropriate actions to mitigate risk.
- Qualys Vulnerability Management Detection and Response (VMDR) — a single-console platform for the discovery, assessment, prioritisation, and patching of critical vulnerabilities in real time, across global hybrid-IT landscapes. This year, Qualys will be highlighting VMDR’s recently added advanced remediation capability, which allows organisations to fix asset misconfigurations, patch operating systems and third-party applications, and deploy custom software.
- Qualys Context XDR — the 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.
Away from the company’s stand, 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.
“The region’s threat landscape never sleeps. Bad actors keep learning. And organisations continue to suffer from IT and security skills gaps. This confluence of factors calls for a renewed look at automation as the best means of securing digital boundaries. GISEC is the region’s preeminent venue for cybersecurity vendors to build awareness around their solutions and innovations. The strong support and participation by UAE government authorities is a huge boon for the event, and Qualys is looking forward to being part of the conversation around how we strengthen our defences and mitigation options in the days ahead,” said Jaafarawi.
