After a year worth of work, Q-CERT announced the release of its new portal. The new portal was developed based on extensive research among our constituency, their needs and the most usable interface. The site serves both technical and non-technical users interested in Cyber Security.

In its home page, the site provides a list of aggregated and automatically filtered feeds. The feeds are split into “General RSS” and “Technical RSS”. The “General RSS” aggregates news feeds from various sources that publish generic as well as specific sector information security news. Whereas the “Technical RSS” aggregates security advisories and vulnerabilities reports from major vendors including Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, CISCO and Oracle. You can subscribe to the aggregated General or Technical RSS feeds on Q-CERT website and receive all the relevant alerts to your system without having to subscribe to multiple RSS.

The highlighted area provides you with a quick way to spot the most significant news, press releases, announcements, publications, etc on Q-CERT website. For example, when we announce a new event or publish an interesting podcast, a brief on that new announcement will be displayed in this box. You can click more to go directly to the item.

The “Learn” section splits into two subsections. The “Library” includes “Reading library” with various white papers and reading materials, “Media library” hosting valuable cyber security and safety podcasts and videos, and “Links” section listing a set of relevant external links to online resources grouped in a logical manner in addition to a description of the underlying web resource behind the URL. The “Training” subsection hosts Q-CERT’s “Course Catalog”, “Training Events” calendar and certification news. Through the training events calendar, you can identify upcoming events/workshops and register online.

Among the most interesting new features we’ve added is the “Threat Status”. People can argue that threat status monitors are available from different security organizations. However, Q-CERT threat status monitor is based on threats that target Qatar and the GCC region rather than global ones. The threat level will always be green unless there are specific threats we are seeing that targets our region. We will then raise the threat level accordingly and detail the reasons for doing that. When you click on “Threat Status” on the top of the page, you will find a subpage called “Dashboard”. In the “Dashboard” you can visualize the results of our monitoring for threats targeting Qatar. The six screens can be clicked for a larger view and to show details and/or comments regarding Malware in Qatar, Botnet activity trend, C&C servers, Daily number of IPs sending spam from Qatar, Daily number of corporate IPs sending spam from Qatar and Top countries sending spam to Qatar.

The “Report Incidents” section provides our constituency with the traditional incident reporting guidelines including our PGP key (sending sensitive data section). Under the “Incident reporting form” subpage, you will find an easy and secure way of reporting incidents to Q-CERT. The form enables you to report your incidents to Q-CERT without storing information on the server while encrypting the traffic submitted. Your submitted incident report will then be sent in an encrypted mail to our incident reporting team who will, as usual, support you in managing the incidents while abiding to our strict confidentiality measures.