Aims and Scope
This online newsletter is to share timely information on COVID-related cyber threats, attacks and solutions, with focus on Bulgarian businesses and sharing best practices from the UK. The newsletter is to be published in English and Bulgarian on the official websites of the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (IICT-BAS), the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) and sent to contacts networks of British Embassy (BE) in Sofia. The initiative builds on previous successful work of BE Sofia with Bulgarian key players in cyber, this project joins the efforts of the UK Science and Innovation Network (SIN), Defense and Security partnership teams in the conditions of a worldwide pandemic. The project aims at promoting the UK expertise and leadership in cyber security especially in this particular moment, and cement UK’s position as a partner-of-choice to Bulgaria in cyber security. Efforts will be undertaken to strengthen the UK-BG collaboration and raise awareness on issues of mutual interest among a wide range of audiences in Bulgaria, including businesses.
In recent years and especially with the COVID-19 pandemics Small and Medium Enterprises/Micro Enterprises (SME/ME) increasingly rely on collaborative tools with adequate cybersecurity to protect against increasing threats to networks, devices, and organizational and personal information. Cybersecurity solutions prevent attacks to the networks and devices accessing to private information. The risk levels vary and real threats can range from sophisticated (cyber terrorism, state sponsored actors) to lower impact attacks (“script kiddies”, malware etc.). What we experience anyway is that we live in more and more connected world with cyber-attacks becoming more and more frequent and dangerous.
The Newsletter is structured to introduce recent news on cybersecurity, related to COVID and SME/ME, present one key topic with an analytical short paper, recommend actions in the identified priority area for the issue, present some valuable resources on cyber security and introduce key institutions in Bulgaria, United Kingdom, NATO and EU, dealing with cyber security.
Every issue will have editor-in-chief introducing the main topic, so we will appreciate a feedback and proposals for the key aspects of Cyber Security for SME/ME to be addressed in the future. The first issue is under the editorial leadership of Prof. Daniela Borissova DSc., Chief Information Officer (CIO) of IICT.
Velizar Shalamanov, IICT deputy director, project leader.
Dr. Emilia Pecheva, UK Embassy in Sofia, Science and Innovation Officer for Bulgaria & Romania.
