Executive director QCRI Dr Ahmed K Elmagarmid made the announcement at a lecture on ‘Cyber Espionage’ at the Tornado Towers yesterday.
Cyber attacks is a global security concern and Qatar too in the recent years has had its share of attacks.
Speaking on the sidelines of the lecture, Elmagarmid said the new initiative had nothing to do with the recent website hacking of government-run bodies such as the Qatar Foundation and insisted that the research centre had been planned well in advance.
He clarified that the centre would not be a response team to the cyber threat, but instead would focus on research on new technologies which would be shared with universities, government agencies and companies, both regionally and locally.
“The response team is the responsibility of ICT Qatar and MoI and other agencies. Our idea is to work on future threats,” he said.
The new centre will also open up new job opportunities. “It was always in our plan to work on embedded security systems. Over the next five years, there will be 50 people hired for this research centre. This year we will start with about 10 people,” Elmagarmid added.
Earlier, two distinguished guest lecturers from the US associated with the Zanttz technology company that have worked with their government agencies spoke at length about the ever evolving danger of cyber threats.
President Zanttz Eric Winsborrow said that today entire countries were involved in engaging cyber attacks and espionage. He was of the view that these days a James Bond like character is not needed to wreak havoc on a country especially since the same damage can be done by a computer software.
He mentioned the example of how the US government used cyber espionage to compromise a nuclear production facility in Iran and render it useless for making weapons. According to him, instead of sending in spies into the country, the US dropped USB devices near the plant hoping that some employees would pick them up. He said that the mission capitalized on the fact that it was human instinct to check out what a USB device contains if one finds it lying on the ground.
However, when the employees used the device inside the nuclear plant, it secretly installed a programme that gave access to the US government to remotely control it at will.
He said the new research centre being set up in Qatar was a dire need, especially because of the face that a potential deadly cyber attack can bring down an entire country if successful.
Vice President Zanttz Craig Schultz also spoke at the lecture.
