Senior cyber defense officials from Morocco, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Bahrain shared the stage recently in Tel Aviv to discuss regional cyber defense strengthening, announcing in this regard the formation of an international coalition dedicated to this mission.
Represented by Brigadier General El Mostafa Rabii, Morocco recently took part in “Cybertech Global 2023”, the global cyber community event, alongside the four parties to the Abraham Accords.
This joint panel included a series of hands-on discussions with various partners regarding cooperation as well as visits to major Israeli cyber centers. The assembly follows the first meeting of the signatories held in December 2022 in Bahrain, where they agreed to accelerate the creation of a common cyber defense platform.
Indeed, the partners have just announced during the last cybersummit the setting up of the international coalition dedicated to cyberdefence.
On this occasion, Brigadier General El Mostafa Rabii, director of the Cyber-attack detection and response monitoring center under the General Directorate for Information Systems Security (DGSSI) and at the same time director of maCERT ( Moroccan Computer Emergency Response Team), said: “ We are a team now, this partnership is a great success“.
” Due to the existence of criminals from various groups, cyber threats no longer have borders and this affects us all. We need to push our teams to work together on concrete cases and to foster trust between us“, continued the senior official.
Asked about the most important achievement in this area for 2022 and the objective for 2023, Brigadier General first wanted to thank Gaby Portnoy, head of Israel’s National Cybersecurity Directorate, and his team, because ” we did an amazing job in a very short time and turned our plans into concrete cooperation. I think the major achievement in 2022 in Morocco was the finalization of the text of the implementation of our law, initially put in place in 2020“.
The Moroccan official pointed out that ” thanks to this law, we have the necessary tools and capacities to properly deal with cyberattacks in our country“, adding that ” the main objective to be achieved in 2023 is to implement a new strategy that aligns with our new law in Morocco“.
For his part, Robert Silvers, the Undersecretary in the Political Department of Homeland Security of the United States, spoke at length about the need for the United States and its allies to work more closely together to counter the attacks of the Iranian regime and its proxies.
” Together we tackle the cyber threats posed by Iran“, he said, noting that Iranian cyber threat actors have continuously worked to improve their cyber capabilities to attack US and Israeli interests.
It should be recalled that, well before the signing, on November 24, 2021, of the military cooperation protocol between Morocco and Israel, the two countries had first concluded, on July 15, 2021 in Rabat, an agreement dedicated to cybersecurity. The signing ceremony was attended by Yigal Unna, the director general of the Israeli Cyber Directorate, his Moroccan counterpart General El Mostafa Rabiî and the Minister Delegate in charge of National Defense Administration, Abdellatif Loudiyi.