Effort to Raise CyberSecurity Levels in Southeast Europe

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DCI, a large French company that specializes in military training, consulting and technical assistance, recently completed a one-week training course to teach 12 trainees from three European countries – Kosovo, Macedonia and Moldavia – how to use a Security Information Management System (SIEM).

Trainees had access to a full IT platform simulating an environment with realistic scenarios to facilitate the elaboration of operational architectures. They worked on prevention and protection in the event of an attack, incident detection and management, and the appropriate responses. as reported by the company.

The training was organised as part of the “Enhancing cybersecurity in Southeast Europe” (ENCYSEC) project, financed by the Instrument contributing to Security and Peace (IcSP) in the European commision. The purpose of this project is to help three countries from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to establish national cyber security strategies, reinforce their capacity to create Computer Emergency Readiness Teams (CERTs) and to enhance international cooperation.

Several cyber threats against Rumanian and Bulgarian banks were uncevered last year,  CSOonline.com reported then. Cybercriminals were increasingly interested in southeast European countries and Bulgaria in particular, citing Michael Paier, ‎General Manager South East Europe at IBM, that said that organizations across southeast Europe were still using less-effective and obsolete IT infrastructures which makes them vulnerable to cyber attacks. He also pointed out that improving the level of IT security requires something more than increased spending. “Many organizations are heavily investing in securing their networks, yet the number of attacks is rising and so is their scale and the damage they cause. One of the key reasons for that is that the majority of security investments in southeast Europe are expected to be directed toward basic security solutions only,” said Paier. The best defense today is to revamp our approach to security, and move towards a unified analytics- and intelligence-driven collaborative fight against cybercrime, he said.