Yusuf UZUNAY

As the founder head of ICT department at AFAD, I found the opportunity to create the whole information structure including software applications, databases and the required network and communication infrastructure literally from scratch. As a kickstarter I also had to dive into structural details taking part in each related business analysis work to establish the most appropriate ICT model and architecture. As all new initiative imposes and beside administrative tasks I was involved in the disaster management processes design studies, especially in disaster management and decision support system as how to find the most appropriate and usable IT solutions. We named our ICT effort of this 3 years as the “Technological Transformation in Disaster Management in Turkey” since with a bottom-up approach it included several different projects starting from the most basic ones such as inventory systems, logistics systems, aid distribution systems, incident management systems to more advanced technologies such as geographic information systems, remote sensing, manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, decision support systems, disaster risk management system, crowd sourcing and so on. Beside my experience in natural disasters, I also have a first-hand experience in man-made disasters especially the refugee crisis that Turkey has been facing since 2011. AFAD is the responsible body in Turkey to coordinate all the humanitarian activities reaching out to 2 million Syrian refugees. From ICT side, we have established 25 sheltering centers equipped with required networking infrastructure and software for registration of refugees and management of all the sheltering center operations called AFKEN- (AFAD Sheltering Center Management System). Meanwhile; I am pleased to say that AFKEN has won the 2015 UN Public Services Award.

In my second post, as head of IT department in Turkish National Agency, since most of the systems were Microsoft based, I had to canalize my focus on Microsoft based systems, which was a great opportunity for me to add Microsoft experience to my Unix experience in my previous work. I used to install and maintain different kinds of Microsoft servers. I also attended Microsoft Certification courses and obtained several credentials from Microsoft including MCSE-Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. In addition to system based security experience in Turkish National Agency, I had also chance to recognize and implement some important systems and security standards and frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001 and COBIT 4.0. I used to take part in identification of the IT assets, risk analysis, penetration tests and creating security policies and procedures in 27001 work. Regarding the COBIT framework, with the coordination of our internal audit department, we tried to define and implement each control objectives in our organization.

During my first job at Turkish National Police, I found the opportunity to build and maintain the network infrastructure of Ankara Provincial Police Department. The systems were based on FreeBSD and Linux operating systems. In the first years of my post, I was very much involved in establishing the required information security infrastructure of the department. I used to install and configure intrusion detection systems, firewalls, file integrity checking systems, vulnerability analyzer systems and put the hands on web server security, software applications security, TCP/IP packet analyzing. I was also interested in establishing a sustainable information security management framework, including security policies and procedures and managing a security team continuously monitoring the existing infrastructure and reporting. When an attack towards our IT systems was detected, we were able to perform a detailed analysis on the network packets including the header and payload parts of the packets. I had also first-hand experience on security software development. UNIDES: Unauthorized Internet Access Detection and Blocking System, USIMAS-User Information Management and Audit System and ILKIZ-Design and Implementation of Embedded Firewall projects are the most prominent project I have developed. Besides my network systems and security administrator roles, I finally undertake the cyber crime investigator role in the newly established cyber crime section. I took part in several criminal investigation cases. Throughout this period, I used to carry out network and computer forensics analysis. I was closely interested in capturing and preserving digital evidences. I designed and published PKIDEV, a system model providing the security of the process for capturing digital evidences in the cyber crime scene.

Thesis title: Increasing trustworthiness of security critical applications using trusted computing