qatar

Brilliant! A Hajjaj cartoon spotted via 360east :

Arab Heaven is:

• A Syrian wife
• Lebanese food
• Emirati citizenship
• Jordanian security
• Egyptian tourism
• A Palestinian neighbor
• Saudi taxes
• Qatari salary

Arab Hell is:

• An Egyptian wife
• Emirati food
• Lebanese citizenship
• Palestinian security
• Qatari tourism
• A Saudi neighbour
• Jordanian taxes
• Syrian salary

Last week Nigel pinged the Qatar Perl Mongers list an invitation to attend the first bi-monthly Qatar Information Security Forum (QISF) which was being hosted by Q-CERT. It's been a while since I attended one of these types of information security events so I figured that it would be a useful opportunity to network with people from Q-CERT, check out the local information security scene and clock up a couple of CPE points.

The lecture part of the program was given by Ian Dowdeswell who just joined Q-CERT - it turned out to be the standard Power Point on "How much security breaches cost and a taxonomatic classification of the evil people who are behind the attacks." This of course reminded me why I always sat in the back of class since the second day of high school.

That being said, it was probably useful for IT Managers and anyone else who did not have to endure 6 hours of multiple choice questions for the CISSP examination.

The Q&A was fairly interesting though with lots of discussion around legislation that would drive information security in the country (apparently there is non planned yet). I also learnt that the Qatari Penal Code of 2004 has section on computer crime (I should look this up at some stage) and that there is a group within the CID that is responsible for computer crime.

Apart from networking, the most productive part of the day for me was being able to complain to the Technical Director of Q-CERT about Q-Tel's notorious proxy server. Almost everyone in the country goes via the proxy which causes endless pain when someone decides to block an abusive user IP since the rest of the country is subsequently banned. Small problem for Wikipedia, but a huge problem for local sites in Qatar where most of the users have the same IP address...