LAHORE – IFTIKHAR ALAM - For the first time in the country’s history an eight member team of computer experts has participated in an international cyber drill and completed all the tasks successfully, various social websites and blogs reported here on Wednesday.
The Pakistani team won the competition held in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, where 25 teams of experts from 20 countries participated, it was informed. The Pakistani team comprised four members of Pakistan Information Security Association and four students of National University of Science and Technology.
The event was organised by the Asia Pacific Computer Emergency Response Team (APCERT). The annual drill was held to test the response capability of leading Computer Security Incident Response Teams from Asia Pacific economies.
It was the first time that APCERT involved the participation from the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation – Computer Emergency Response Team (OIC-CERT) in the annual drill, following a Memorandum of Understanding on collaboration signed in September, 2011.
The theme of the APCERT Drill 2012 was “Advance Persistent Threats and Global Coordination”.
The objective was for participating teams to exercise incident response handling arrangements locally and internationally to mitigate the impact of advance persistent threats that involved large scale malicious software propagation and attacks capable of impairing the critical infrastructure and economic activities. The main focus of the event was to educate the participants, who were given specific task to complete them within a time limit.
The exercise reflected a strong collaboration amongst the economies, and it also enhanced the communication protocols, technical capabilities and quality of incident responses for assuring Internet security and safety. About 22 CSIRT teams from Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, People’s Republic of China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Macao, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Tunisia, Egypt and Pakistan participated in the drill.