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Rabat – The Directorate General of Information System Security (DGSSI), Morocco’s cybersecurity watchdog, partnered with SecDojo, a company specializing in cybersecurity training, to organize late last month the DGSSI CTF (Catch The Flag) event.
The event aimed to support Morocco in building capacity in cybersecurity, SecDojo said in a press release shared with Morocco World News.
“This initiative marks a significant step in the country’s response to the escalating cyber threats and the global shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals,” the statement noted.
Commenting on the news, Younes Benzagmout, Co-Founder and Associate Director at SecDojo, described the 2024 DGSSI CTF as reflecting Morocco’s “commitment to training a qualified cybersecurity workforce, capable of facing tomorrow’s technological and security challenges.”
According to Benzagmout, the cybersecurity event featured a competition that invited participants to undertake “realistic missions in various areas such as system security, network security, penetration testing, application security, malware analysis, forensic analysis, and incident response.”
More than 450 students representing 108 educational institutions and more than 180 working professionals participated in the event. By bringing together security enthusiasts from both the professional and academic realms, the event fostered knowledge exchange and healthy competition, SecDojo explained in a statement.
According to SecDojo’s statement, the event contributed to the development of a “skilled cybersecurity workforce essential for navigating future technological and security challenges.”
Cyberthreat in Morocco
In addition to promoting cybersecurity education, the DGSSI also works to defend Morocco against cybersecurity threats. The agency detected and neutralized 577 cybersecurity threats in 2021, with most of the attacks targeting government ministries.
Last year, Morocco was ranked 15th on a list of countries in which the Internet is faced with online infections. The ranking was based on data collected by Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky in the first 10 months of 2023.
Approximately 19% of internet users in Morocco ran the risk of cyber infections – a type of malware that typically infiltrates a user’s device without their knowledge, often because it camouflages itself as a different file type such as an image or PDF file.
In the North Africa region, Morocco is the third country most exposed to cyber threats, after Algeria.
Over the first 10 months of 2023, ransomware Trojans attacked over 193,000 unique users in Morocco, including 53,000 corporate users and 6,000 users associated with small and medium-sized businesses.
Trojans are a type of malware code or software that can take control of a user’s computer. It’s designed to harm a device by disrupting, stealing, or causing other damaging actions to data or networks.
An earlier assessment by the African Cyberthreat Assessment Report showed that, on the continental level, Morocco was the most exposed country to banking trojans and cyber extortion schemes in 2022.
According to the report, which was published in April 2023, 18,827 detected cyber attacks were traced back to Morocco. The country was also exposed to the highest number of online extortion schemes at 69%.
Read Also: Morocco Ranks 15th Among Counties Most Vulnerable to Cyber Threats
