On Tuesday, 17^th December, 2024 National Institute of Public Administration, (NIPA) Lahore, arranged a workshop with Dr. Ayesha Altaf and Dr. Faiza Iqbal on “Cyber Security & Use of IT Applications” for the participants of 42^nd MCMC.

Dr. Ayesha began the session by explaining Cyber Security. She defined it as the ‘act of protecting ICT systems and their contents from attack, disruption, or other threats She elaborated that Cybersecurity encompasses information security, which is defined as protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction in order to provide integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the information. She explained various threats including data/data source compromise, spoofing and hacking mentioning some recent attacks on FBR. She also differentiated between threat, vulnerability and attack. Threat being a potential violation of security, vulnerability, a weakness that makes it possible for a threat to occur, and attack, a malicious and deliberate attempt that leads to violation of security. The guest speaker explained the steps of cyber security cycle comprising of identification, protection of asset/data, detection of an attack/threat, responding to the attack/threat and recovering from an attack/threat. Dr. Ayesha elaborated that there are four kinds of responses to threats/attacks. One, risk avoidance is to discontinue with the activity altogether. Two, risk acceptance is to accept the risk but do nothing. Three, risk mitigation is to adopt parameters to mitigate risk. Four, risk transference is to put data on trusted cloud and transfer risk to third party. She briefly explained how to mitigate threats as well.

Having introduced the Cloud, Dr Faiza further elaborated Cloud Computing. She defined cloud computing as a model that enables convenient on demand delivery of computing resources from anywhere to a shared pool of resources such as servers’ storages which can then be shared among organizations through networking. Dr Faiza discussed essentials of cloud computing being on demand self-service, broad network access and resource pooling. She explained that the benefits of cloud computing included cost saving, fast citizen service delivery, data back-up/recovery and analytics for decision making.

For both Cyber Security and use of IT Applications hands on exercises were conducted by the guest speakers in order to build the capacity of the participants.