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Cybersecurity trainings to be held for industrial enterprises’ staff in Azerbaijan

3 December 2017 13:55 (UTC+04:00)
Cybersecurity trainings to be held for industrial enterprises’ staff in Azerbaijan

By Agul Salmanova

Kaspersky Lab, a Russian multinational cyber security and anti-virus provider, organizes cyber security trainings for technical personnel of oil and gas companies in Azerbaijan, Andrey Suvorov, director of business development for critical infrastructure security at the company, told Trend.

The process of providing industrial cyber defense is quite complex, since it takes time to get acquainted with the enterprise before implementing the system, Suvorov says.

“There are a number of indicators that play an important role in the introduction of industrial cyber defense systems. First of all, this is due to the decision of which vendors for industrial automation are used in the enterprise,” he noted. “The factories usually use components of complex solutions of well-known vendors, such as Honeywell, Siemens, etc. Therefore, an important requirement for us is whether these vendors are ready to work with us. Therefore, before entering the market, we first of all consider what vendor solutions are used here,” he said.

Suvorov said that Azerbaijan there are two key areas - oil and gas chemistry and energy, which allows us to narrow down the circle and find out which developers have installed automation systems in those or other enterprises in the country.

“Then we start working with customers. However, the issue is, we work at the junction of two worlds, cyber and physical security. Historically, cyber security specialists are responsible for IT security specialists, and for industrial automation - an engineer, a production director or team of operators,” he noted. “Still in many companies of the world, and Azerbaijan is not an exception, these teams do not get along with each other. To protect both these teams, we need to ensure their mutual understanding, which we spend a lot of time.”

Both units, he said, confidently declare that their system is isolated from external threats, and they in every possible way interfere with new initiatives to ensure reliable protection of the infrastructure from cyberthreats.

“We take the time to prove to both teams that any breach in the system can be used by a hacker at least to reduce the quality of the output product. Moreover, hacking can be carried out by an attacker from an ordinary cafe, where there is a wireless Wi-Fi. And in order to clearly explain all this, we were forced to invest in training,” Suvorov noted.

He said that in order to clearly explain this, they were forced to invest in trainings. They have developed three trainings on industrial cybersecurity. One of them was adapted especially for IT security specialists and engineers, so that both teams could more easily understand what is meant by industrial safety.

In order to get serious projects, he said, first of all, it is necessary to work with vendors present in the market, and until Kaspersky Lab does not cooperate with them, the company offers customers training and building a threat model.

“There are a number of companies in Azerbaijan with which we are discussing this issue, our representative in the country has a large network of partners and companies with whom we communicate on this topic,” Suvorov said.

Today, Azerbaijan is one of the leading countries implementing high technology in the region. The country is confidently striving to enter the world’s ICT race. The cyber security center, created in 2013, aims to protect users from online threats, malware cyber-attacks and other adversities.

In Azerbaijan, the population is highly computerized and computer skills have become a major requirement for all applicants. The number of Internet users in THE COUNTRY exceeded 7.8 million in first half of 2017, accounting for 78.2 percent of the country’s population, according to Statistical project Internet World Stats. The country ranks first among the countries of Post-Soviet region for the level of broadband internet penetration.

For 10 months of this year, 5,500 corporate users in Azerbaijan were subjected to cyber attacks, representative of Kaspersky Lab in the country Mushvig Mammadov noted earlier. On average, every user was exposed to 50 attacks.

The report by Kaspersky Lab titled Information Technology Security Threats, published in the second quarter of 2017, showed that 22.81 percent of computers in Azerbaijan are at risk of infection via the Internet, which is about 24 percent less compared to the first quarter of this year.

In order to protect a computer from any kind of cyber attacks, the user should use antivirus programs and be attentive while surfing the Internet, not visiting suspicious websites and using such applications.

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