Dipping into digital waters

When four officers of two highly respected Lebanese military institutions—the Lebanese Army and the Internal Security Forces—in mid-January took their chairs on a panel at the American University of Beirut (AUB) to participate in what the university advertised as its first Cyber Security Day, the assembled students, professors from various academic institutions, and guests, did not exude any boredom or exasperation with the “dry” topic of which the moderator of this third panel had warned. To the contrary, during the panel’s progression, ears opened ever wider, and attention spans were universally beefed to their maximum settings when Major Marc Sawan, head of the ISF’s Digital Forensics and Cybercrime Unit, started telling his cautionary tale of two information technology (IT) experts, one of them an aggressive hacker and the other an IT administrator with a habit of posting personal information. According to the officer’s revelations of a chain of incidents unfolding