June 5, 2008
The inaugural meeting of the Qatar chapter of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) took place on Carnegie Mellon University's Qatar Campus on May 22. The event was an instant hit because OWASP addresses a growing concern for the security of web-based applications.
Q-CERT sponsored the event to increase awareness about web security in Qatar and to give the local IT community the opportunity to actively participate and interact with some 120 local chapters around the globe. The enthusiasm for the initiative was obvious among QCERT's constituencies, with representatives from CMU-Q, Qatar Petroleum, Microsoft Qatar, and Al-Jazeera Network attending the event.
OWASP is a nonprofit international organization dedicated to improving information security at the web application layer by considering all the dimensions of the problem: people, process, and technology.
The attendees went through a live demo of exploiting a vulnerable e-commerce website and were invited to access a huge library of materials and secure coding standards and testing guidelines. To the delight of the attendees, all materials were free.
If you are concerned about web security and would like to be notified of our next meeting, the OWASP Doha chapter invites you to subscribe to the group email.