Cyber Security Conference 2022

After more than two years online, on the 19th and 20th of May, 2022, information technology and cyber security experts from 9 countries met in Belchin village, Bulgaria, for the 1st Edition of the Cyber S^PAecurity Conference to share their personal and business experiences in Big Data Analytics, Digital Transformation, Learning Paths for Security Specialists, Mobile Security, Zero Trust Network Access, Database Security and Management, Security Operations, Vulnerability and Risk Management, Network Security and Threat Intelligence, and more.

The event was hosted by Escom Bulgaria Ltd. and New Horizons Bulgaria Ltd., in partnership with Dencrypt, GTB Technologies Inc, macmon secure, Micro Focus, Quest Software, One Identity, SUSE, and Alorica (Microsoft partner). The two-day program offered all participants interesting and different presentation panels filled with insightful content, networking, entertainment, accommodation, and time for Wellness & SPA, all free for the attendees.

THE AGENDA HIGHLIGHTS

The official opening was on the 19^th of May at 11:00 AM, Sofia time. Mr. Alexander Zhekov, General Manager of Escom Bulgaria, and Mr. Nikolay Penev, General Manager of New Horizons Bulgaria, welcomed the delegates and guests and shortly introduced their organizations.

Escom Bulgaria is a Value Add Distributor of leading vendors of Information Security solutions and IT infrastructure, B2B oriented, with 20 years of history in the Bulgarian IT sector, and is providing its partners quality of services, professional expertise, and high level of technical, pre-sales and after-sales support.

New Horizons Bulgaria is a leading IT and business training company with 20 years of history in the Bulgarian market, part of the largest independent IT training company New Horizons, operates in over 40 countries around the world and has over 30 million trained students so far.

During the second day, the 20^th of May, attendees had the opportunity to learn more about cybersecurity career paths for: Security Architect, Penetration Tester/Ethical Hacker, Security Operations / Governance, CCISO, Developers, and end users’ training.

Participants had the pleasure to touch on the new cyber resiliency and security solutions trends. An exciting experience was brought by the actual customers’ success stories in the field of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM).

We would like to thank especially Mr. Lubomir Tulev, Director of Managed Security Services at DIGITALL, who had been honored as a keynote speaker and moderator of the Discussion Panel. During both days, he shared his experience as an information security expert and what are the steps in building and developing a cyber security team.

Our deepest gratitude is to the co-organizer and moderator of the conference Mrs. Lyudmila Malcheva, CEO of Right Image Ltd., who successfully coped with the constant transition from live presentations to online tracks, and vice versa.

A fascinating aspect of the conference was the diversity of presentations and presenters. There were people from nine different countries, often presenting real case studies from even more countries. Those IT experts who could not travel joined us via ZOOM without having to leave the comfort of their homes.

Micro Focus – our actions today, impact tomorrow!

Mr. Vesselin Yankov, Micro Focus’s Country Representative for Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and Mr. Boris Nakev, eMBA, MSc Sales Executive for SEE at Micro Focus joined us live in Belchin, Bulgaria. Mr. Nakev covered: „Best Practices in Aligning Service Management and Service Assurance“ and explained how to manage, control, and distribute resources and services to medium and large organizations with Micro Focus IT Operations Management solutions.

Mr. Paul Rademakers, Sales Manager for Big Data Platform EMEA at Micro Focus was online and shared his experience in “Unified analytics platform for text, Video, Audio, and Image” or how to process and analysis of different types and structures of data, nowadays the data is constantly growing, with Micro Focus IDOL for Government & Financial Services.

We want to thank Mr. Milko Simeonov, Project Manager and Architect of Solutions at INTEPRO, for sharing his experience in the practical aspects of control and management of accesses and rights relative to the roles of different users in different systems and environments with Micro Focus IAM solution.

One Identity – who guards the guards?

Mr. Mielnicki covered two presentation panels. On the first day, in the „Challenges with the Privileged Access“, he talked about how to manage access and sessions to critical resources to the internal infrastructure of the organizations. The second-day topic was “Active Roles – AD-based Identity Management”, which included extremely useful information on how to protect critical Active Directory and Azure Active Directory data, deploy quickly for rapid time-to-value, generate audit-ready reports, and more.

macmon NAC – smartly simple!

macmon secure extends its proven protection to all enterprise resources in the cloud in 2021 with its zero-trust network access strategy and is the only provider of NAC plus SDP with Identity and Access Management from Germany. The Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) model is based on the philosophy of not trusting a device or user until they are finally authenticated. The number of devices in the internal networks is constantly increasing and increases the risk for security.

How do we manage all these devices? How can we automatically respond to an accident? Mrs. Sandy Kellner, Partner Management and International Distribution Management, and Michael Reinholz, Presales Engineer at macmon secure GmbH, came from Berlin, Germany, and answered during the live presentations: “Zero Trust Network Access – how to use macmon NAC and SDP to have a secure environment.“

Dencrypt – Secure. Private. Convenient.

Mobile phones are quickly becoming one of the most used endpoints in the enterprise. They have surpassed their capacity as a simple calling device and are now functioning like a personal assistant. This has led many organizations to expand their mobile work practices and BYOD/COPE device strategies, to achieve a more agile workforce. Although this change in work strategy has many benefits, it also comes with new security risks for the organizations. The attendees learn more about the security challenges in a Mobile Collaboration environment and how to mitigate them from Mr. Michael Appelby, Sales Director at Dencrypt.

SUSE – Innovative Everywhere.

Mr. Arpad Kelemen, SEE Business Development Manager at SUSE, joined us online from Hungary and presented two customers’ success stories. The first one: “How OTP Bank Romania operates the large network of branches and online services in the heavily regulated financial services industry with the runs majority of its core banking applications on SLES. These include internet banking, credit and debit card processing, credit approvals, treasury operations, and internal applications. And the second one, SUSE RANCHER – advantage of the container instead of Cloud or Virtualization. RANCHER is a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Multicloud Container Development Platforms, Q3, 2020 report, and #1 ECM on Gartner Peer Insights.

GTB Technologies – Data Security without the false positives!

GTB Technologies is a new DLP solution provider vendor in ESCOM’s portfolio. GTB’s Data Protection Solutions are unique from leading competitors in that it addresses threats from both trusted and untrusted users, discovering data and stopping breaches from applications (such as SAP, Office 365, Oracle eBusiness Suite, EPIC, and other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or custom applications) and data repositories (such as Microsoft SharePoint, File Shares and others.) With unique patented and patent-pending fingerprinting features, GTB data protection solutions are capable of real-time inspection of all protocols (even those that may be unknown) and have the ability to optionally stop data loss immediately; as opposed to just reporting it. Leaking and losing corporate data is a topic that is highly sensitive to any organization. Mr. Andrei Rogovets, EMEA Business Development Manager at GTB Technologies presented more details online, from Ukraine.

BIG DATA Security.

In this part, Mr. Deyan Yovkov, Managing Director at Security Solutions Institute, shared his experience of successfully implementing projects in “Building and protecting the Big Data System under HADOOP/CLOUDERA.” The company’s team covers all activities on system architecture design, installation, configuration and upgrade, faculty training, systems support, and more.

Alorica – Microsoft partner.

With the partnership of Alorica, Mr. Paulius Nomgaudas, CIO at The Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, joined us online from Lithuanian. Mr. Nomgaudas talked about how at the end of 2021, their university was attacked by hackers demanding 500 million euros in cryptocurrency to decrypt their data from their data center. In a week and a half, they managed to restore 99% of the data with Azure backups. This case perfectly demonstrates how external suppliers can save a catastrophic situation.

Cyber security Act (EU Regulation 2019/881).

A special guest at the Cyber S^PAsecurity Conference was Dr. George Sharkov, CEO of the European Software Institute CEE and head of Cyber Security and Resilience Lab since 2003. He was an adviser to the Bulgarian Minister of Defense (2014-2021) and the National Cybersecurity Coordinator, leading the development of the national Cyber Resilience strategy. Member of the EU AI High-Level Expert Group, SMEs voice at ETSI technical committees (TC CYBER and ISG “Securing AI”), ENISA Ad-Hoc Group on AI, ENISA EU Stakeholders Cybersecurity Certification Group. He holds a Ph.D. in AI and lecturing at four leading universities (software quality, cybersecurity, resilience, security). Mr. Sharkov shared his experience on the requirements for certification of products, services, and processes (organizations) under the Cybersecurity Certification Schemes related to the Cybersecurity Act (EU Regulation 2019/881). As well as the activities they undertake in Bulgaria.

Special thanks to all our partners and guests!

Online from South Africa, Mr. Mathew Clarke, Senior Solutions Engineer at Quest, joined us for the panel “Securing your Active Directory Attack Paths” with Quest & SpecterOps. We often have to migrate corporate data between different environments, as well as have to manage them in a hybrid environment. Mr. Clarke showed Active Directory Attack Path, AD cyber security challenges, and how to follow Cybersecurity Frameworks.

We especially thank Mr. Kolio Kolev, IT Director at Bulgarian Customs Agency, Mrs. Ginka Mitova, Senior Expert in Registers Directorate, and Mr. Ivan Nurkov, Head of Department Information Technologies and Cyber Defence at the Ministry of Justice, for their live presentations.

RAFFLE DRAW

And what would be a Cyber S^PAsecurity Conference without awards for the most patient and inquiring – great educational rewards:

CompTIA Security+ training;
Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP) training;
Vouchers for the online art platform Seven Arts.

ENTERTAINMENT

Numerous attractions awaited the participants during the conference – refreshing cocktails, dancing ballet, a light show, and more. Thanks for the partnership of Event Barman, Ballet TL DANCE, and Club DIVINITAS. And the hotspot during the Gala dinner was the musicians from the Bulgarian rock band Diana Express – Mitko Shterev, Iliya Angelov, Biser Iossifov, Zhivko Topalov, and Alexander Georgiev. The great mood of the guests on both days was taken care of by Mr. Ivan Matev – DJ and photographer.

It was a great experience for all of us!

See you again at Cyber Security Conference 2023!

COMING SOON!