IHS Telekom, the Turkish distributor of VeriSign, organized a conference recently in Istanbul. Along with IHS Telecom executives, some specialists attended the conference to make their presentations. One of these specialists was Verisign EMEA Region Threat Analyst Mohammad Hluchan.
After the conference, we managed to make an interview with Mr Hluchan. You can read our interview below.
Turk Internet: Hello. I would like to ask you to introduce yourself please.
Mohammad Hluchan : My name is Mohammad Hlcuhan as it says on this badge that I got for the conference. I came here to Turkey about one week ago to do research. Specifically I work for VeriSign iDefence of which IHS Telecom is a reseller in Turkey. My job is that of an analyst.
I research activities of hackers in Turkey and all of the rest of Middle East, what I call the Greater Middle East – “Buyuk Ortadogu”. That means the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, Israel, and also Central Asia, Pakistan and India. So it’s a quite large area and I am concerned with the hackers and the cyber security threaten in all these regions that I just mentioned.
What the hackers do, why they do it, what motivates them, and everything that pertains that whole question. And I monitor the trends in the community of hackers in this region. For example recently we started to see botnet technologies like Zeus rooting from Russia and spreading into hacker communities, especially Arabic speaking hacker communities like in Morocco.
Before we didn’t use to see that. The whole botnet issues and the botnet technologies generally was something we were not really conceived of for whatever reason. But now we see decent signs. That’s an example of the trends I am monitoring.
And now I am here for about a month to attend some conferences, to give technical support to our reseller here and to do some research and learn about what’s going on here. Because Turkey of course is an important part of the Middle Eastern IT security landscape. So there you go.
Turk Internet: I’d like to ask you about hackers. You know it’s very interesting topic for people (readers) and there is a hype going over hackers for 5 may be 10 years. What can you tell me about the Turkish hackers?
Mohammad Hluchan : Well, I can tell you that in terms of the Middle East, I mean as far as Middle East goes, they are above the average. They are arguably the strongest hacking community in the Middle East. For various different reasons they also have a greater propensity to acquire knowledge more quickly, more accurately and more precisely than the other communities of hackers in the Middle East.
I think that’s in part due to certain linguistic reasons such as the use of Roman alphabet which has allowed Turkish hacking communities to be more exposed to computer technology more quickly, more directly coming from the western countries.
So they’ve had greater exposure more quickly earlier and that has allowed them to develop more quickly relative to other hackers in the rest of the Middle East so to speak. So that’s just one reason there are other reasons I can expand this topic.
Turk Internet: Latest trend in IT is cloud computing. So what do you think about securing the cloud computing form hackers? A real challenge?
Mohammad Hluchan: I think the word real challenge is an enormous underestimate. I don’t think you can secure the cloud totally. I mean the whole cloud, internet based computing and all this is so big. I can say securing the cloud is even impossible. I mean there is always going to be some element of danger. If you have something of value and somebody wants to steal it from you, there is always going to be a risk.
Find the following part of this interview at : Hluchan : Money is also a Motivation for The Turkish Hackers – 2
See the Turkish translation of this interview at : Hluchan : Bir Bulutu Tamamen Güvenli Hale Getirmek İmkansız – 1 link.
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