The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), represented by the National Computer Emergency Response Team (aeCERT), one of the TRA initiatives, has been awarded with the Middle East CIO 20 Awards for the most innovative projects in 2010 for the development and successful implementation of the HoneyPHARM system.

The Middle East CIO 20 Awards honor the top 20 organizations that are using information technology in innovative ways to deliver business value, whether by creating competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, enabling growth or improving relationships with customers.
H.E. Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanim, TRA Director General said: "TRA was always keen to encourage innovation and quality, relying on them as pillars of our success. We are very grateful to the entire team for helping us achieve this industry award."

aeCERT won the prestigious award for its innovative system that is based on the "Honeypot" technology, which is designed to be hacked and infected. The system does not run real services and it entices malicious software to be downloaded. Consequently, almost anything that it captures is to be treated suspiciously.

Through this mechanism the captured software and can be analyzed and checked whether it is a malware that antivirus providers can defend against. If not, they create a signature for it and push it to their users.
Without such a technology, the discovery technique of a malware will solely depend on infecting a real system, bearing all the damage that it may cause. In order to enhance the proactive approach of handling security threats, The UAE Honeynet Project has been initiated. aeCERT has been increasing the number of honeypots and distributed them across the UAE and its constituents infrastructure.

In order to allow the distributed honeypots to send all what they captured to a central repository to conduct the required study and analysis, the HoneyPHARM system has been developed. "HoneyPHARM created a central analysis for the distributed findings and a central management for all the honeypots" says Ahmad Hassan, the Monitoring and Response Team Leader at aeCERT. "The system allows the constituents to access the graphical analytical view of their honeypot and of what it collects through a web portal."