Dr Brett Van Niekerk, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Technology (IT) at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) recently had an opportunity to co-present a keynote address at the 21st European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security held both physically and online over a two-day period.

His presentation was titled: “Multidisciplinarity and Multistakeholderism for Cyber Resilience of Emerging Economies: Lessons from Cyber Challenges”. He co-presented along Dr Trishana Ramluckan, a Research Manager at Educor and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) School of Law and Ms Noelle van der Waag-Cowling, Cyber lead at the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa at Stellenbosch University.

Explaining how he afforded this opportunity of a lifetime. “My co-presenters and I won an international cybersecurity competition in January 2021, and we have been involved in judging competitions subsequently. The competitions focus on incident response from strategic and policy perspectives in addition to the technical. The keynote was presenting the lessons learnt and our experiences. We were the first South Africans to present a keynote at European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security in its 21 years of existence.”

He revealed that it was his fourth time presenting at this prestigious international conference as previously he had presented submitted research papers.

“The conference had presenters from 16 countries across five continents. It ran as a hybrid conference hosted by the University of Chester (UK). There were over 50 presentations made over the two days of the conference,” explained Dr Van Niekerk.

He believes his participation at the conference has benefited DUT as it afforded the University international recognition.

Dr Van Niekerk is a National Research Foundation (NRF) rated researcher, co-editor of the International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism. He is also a Chair of the International Federation of Information Processing working group on ICT uses in Peace and War. He joined DUT under the Faculty of Accounting and Informatics in January 2022.

He holds a PhD in Information Systems focusing on cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection.

Pictured: Dr Van Niekerk

Simangele Zuma