Cyber Safety Senior Specialist

Nora Al-Abdullah works in Outreach, Awareness and Training Department one of the Qatar's Cyber Safety and Security National Program pillars. She holds a bachelor of science in computer engineering from Qatar University.

With a little less than four years of experience in this field, Nora started her journey in information security as a specialist within Qatar's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Q-CERT). During that time, she went through an intensive training program delivered by CERT/CC experts. She participated in setting the guidelines for establishing the threat analysis capability, resolving some of the incidents reported to Q-CERT, in addition to participating in cyber safety awareness projects for Information Technology professionals.

Her passion towards spreading awareness drove her to this current position. She worked in many related projects such as the ITU's protecting children in cyber space initiative. As a first trial for spreading awareness among the public in Qatar, she started along with her colleague, writing a weekly column in a local news paper. Her writings in Arabic language touched on basic and perhaps complex cyber safety concepts by presenting them in a simplified manner to the common reader. These columns were backed up by a blog that was created to give more advice, details and to answer the public's questions and concerns in this regard. Nora is continuously assisting in various cyber safety initiatives concerning children such as the "Keep Them Safe, Keep them Curious" awareness campaign and the children website, Safe-Space. She is currently developing a corporate awareness campaign along with other projects.

A Qatari citizen, Nora aims to be one of those that cause a paradigm shift in cyber safety and security awareness in the GCC and Middle East region.