MANAMA: Bahrain is working on a Telecommunication Emergency Response Plan aimed at thwarting cyberattacks and other threats facing the sector.
The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced yesterday that it was collaborating with stakeholders from the sector to work on the contingency strategy.
It added that this was in accordance with the Government’s fourth and fifth National Telecommunications plans.
The response plan will lay the foundations for a sector-wide effective and co-ordinated response to a telecom emergency.
“By defining the roles and responsibilities of the licensees and the authority during the pre-disaster and post-disaster phases and by laying down the sequence of actions to be taken by the sector during a telecom emergency, this document aims to provide guidance to the sector in these circumstances,” said a TRA statement.
Concerned entities involved will have information to incidents and telecom emergencies that may have a direct or indirect impact on critical assets.
“We all depend upon on telecoms; it is essential it just works all the time,” said TRA general director Philip Marnick.
“In emergency or disaster situations we need to ensure the TRA and industry can work together so we have a working telecoms system both here in Bahrain and to and from other countries.
“We cannot be cut off.
“Our Plan is designed to ensure we have resilience and if emergencies occur – be they natural disasters, or other significant emergency events – we can all work together to get communications working, to keep us connected and to support disaster relief and search and rescue operations,” Mr Marnick added.
The GDN reported in January that plans were drawn up by the National Cybersecurity Centre to increase cyber security and protect Bahrain’s networks and infrastructures against online threats.
This included an emergency contingency plan to protect critical assets and even recover data that could be possibly lost during a cyber-attack.
The GDN reported last month that more than 13 million (13,099,967) email threats, and 1.7m (1,760,236) URL victim attacks were detected and blocked across Bahrain last year, according to Trend Micro’s Annual Cybersecurity Report for 2021.
The report also revealed that 480,244 malware attacks were identified and stopped.
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