PhD Student Sharifah Roziah Binti Mohd Kassim wins Best Paper Award at IEEE DSC 2022

Sharifah Roziah Binti Mohd Kassim, 3rd Year PhD student at iCSS and the School of Computing, together with her PhD supervisors Professor Shujun Li (iCSS Director) and Dr Budi Arief (iCSS Innovation Lead), won the Best Paper Award (Experience and Practice Track) at the IEEE DSC 2022 (5th IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing), which was held on 22-24 June, 2022, in Edinburgh, UK and online as a hybrid event. The title of their award-winning paper is "How National CSIRTs Operate: Personal Observation and Experience from MyCERT", co-authored with Dr Solahuddin Shamsuddin, Chief Technology Officer of CyberSecurity Malaysia.

This is an outstanding achievement, as the IEEE DSC Conference is a prestigious conference sponsored by the IEEE Reliability Society. In 2022, the IEEE DSC conference also includes a category for experience and practice papers on recent findings that predominantly contribute to design know-how or the extension of the community's knowledge about how the security protection of known techniques fares in real-world operations.

Sharifah said: 'We are very pleased to have received this award for what we believe is a significant piece of work that connects research with practice for improving the real-world operations of Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) and the wider security operations.'

This paper provides personal observations and opinions regarding critical areas of operational practices in national CSIRTs, i.e., the use of tools and data for investigations of cyber incidents, cyber threat information exchange and collaboration with cross-CSIRT organisations. The authors of this paper hope to induce more promising research to address the gaps identified in the study and contribute to national CSIRTs and cyber security practitioners.