The joint projects of the European Union and of the Council of Europe, iPROCEEDS-2 and CyberEast, alongside Leonardo and Cyber 4.0, organised the Regional Cybercrime Co-operation Exercise between CSIRTs and Law Enforcement.
The scope of this joint exercise was to address the use of cyber tools to pursue political, economic financial and strategic interests, in line with the Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention) and its Second Additional Protocol on enhanced co-operation and disclosure of electronic evidence.
Over 50 representatives of law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and CSIRT experts from the countries of the Eastern Partnership, South East Europe and Türkiye actively took part in this technical simulation exercise. Participants examined various types of state-sponsored attacks in an effort to strengthen interagency co-operation techniques, as well as cybercrime investigations/security incident handling in real-time environments. Instances of cyber incident/cybercrime related to cyber-espionage were also analysed, with a focus on advanced persistent Darknet threats.
This initiative is particularly relevant in the context of state-sponsored cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, occurring during the ongoing war against Ukraine. This phenomenon has major global repercussions on the cybercrime environment.
“Ukraine struggles everyday with cyberattacks which affect our infrastructure that people are using in their daily lives. We should find new solutions, we should find bright ideas in order to face it and to solve this problem, ” said Oleksandr TABAK, representative of the Department of International Organisations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
The Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention)
The Second Additional Protocol on enhanced co-operation and disclosure of electronic evidence