The Qatar Stars League fully aligned with the Ministry of Transport and Communications’ cyber crisis exercise by playing a proactive role in the unique initiative.

The National Cyber Drill, codenamed Star-5, was a simulated and co-ordinated exercise with an objective to verify, test and improve national-level communication, co-ordination and collaboration at the time of cyber attack or crisis situation.

The crisis communication drill’s main areas of focus were Orientation, Learning and Collaboration.

Orientation facilitated a controlled environment to organisations for simulating experience of an expected situation to increase awareness of threats, risks and the importance of effective action in response to the simulated conditions.

Learning dealt with enhancing knowledge, skills or abilities by individuals, organisations and sectors with the goal of mastering specific competencies such as Incident Handling, Risk Management and Crisis Co-ordination.

Collaboration provided people and agencies with an opportunity to work together towards achieving a common end result, promote sharing of knowledge and gathering data to determine the needs of government agencies, critical sector organisations and individuals, align national efforts for cyber security and improve upon policy and training framework.

The ministry has been organising a series of events towards strengthening core process areas like Incident Response, Business Continuity, Risk Management and Crisis Communications for critical sector organisations such as Government, Energy, Finance, Communications, Health, Utility, Education and Transport.

The drill included Table Top Streamline that consisted of Table Top Exercise and Crisis Communications Workshop. The participants were management team members.

The next was Technical Streamline comprising Technical Exercise and Technical Explanatory Participation Workshop. The attendees were IT experts.

Table Top Exercise exposed those who took part to different case studies and various cybersecurity scenarios, and were asked to find the best possible ways to communicate more effectively and efficiently to find solutions.

Crisis Communications Workshop focused on effective as well as efficient communication between team members during any given cyber crisis.

The organisations were also given virtual environments to test end-to-end readiness of people, process and technology in the comfort of their environment.