Bulgaria’s national system integrator, Bulgaria Information Services (BIS) has deployed Google Cloud’s Cybershield service to enhance the eastern European country’s national cyber defence capabilities, one of the first such implementations of Cybershield in Europe, which it claims will position Bulgaria as a flagship for centralised, AI-powered cyber security.
Backed by funding from the European Union (EU) – reflecting a regional mandate to better secure the bloc’s eastern border – the project is designed to consolidate cyber intelligence and telemetry to enable BIS to reduce the mean time to detect and respond to threats to 54 Bulgarian government and public sector entities, moving from a reactive to a proactive posture.
“Our partnership with Google Cloud is the result of an eight-year relationship built on trust and technical excellence,” said Simeon Kartselyanski, cyber security manager at BIS and leader of Bulgaria’s National Cyber Security Operations Center.
“By integrating advanced AI-driven security operations and frontline threat intelligence, we are maturing our national defenses to protect Bulgaria’s digital resilience and critical infrastructure. This project serves as a model for how EU nations can utilise centralised capabilities to stay ahead of persistent adversaries.”
Federated SOC
With rapid, AI-driven evolution of cyber threats rendering many traditional defences obsolete, the collaboration will form a key plank of Bulgaria’s National Cyber Defence Strategy, which is seeking to address this challenge by setting up a federated, cross-body security operations centre (SOC).
As part of this centralised approach to cyber, BIS will use Google Cloud Security Operations and Google Threat Intelligence incorporating frontline insights from Mandiant, to enable the government bodies in scope to respond quickly and holistically, backed by Google Cloud’s secure-by-design infrastructure.
BIS said it would also benefit from specialist analyst capabilities to support it in detecting and neutralising complex intrusion scenarios, ultimately helping strengthen its own security expertise.
Boris Geogiev, Google Cloud director of central and eastern Europe, said: “Bulgaria is taking a leading role in European cyber security by executing a highly sophisticated, centralised defence strategy.
“Through Cybershield, we are helping Information Services transform Bulgarian national security from a manual craft into an automated science, fighting AI-powered threats with superior AI-powered defenses. We are proud to support Bulgaria as one of the first EU nations to deploy this integrated system of action.”
What is Cybershield?
Set up back in 2023 and previously known as Chronicle Cybershield, the service was developed as a government-specific product to help defend against disruptive and sophisticated adversaries, acknowledging that effective national cyber defence strategies call for essentially instantaneous knowledge sharing and unmatched situational awareness of the threat landscape.
It was created at least partly in response to the number of response efforts mounted by Mandiant on behalf of government bodies – which represented 25% of its investigations in 2022 compared to a mere 9% in 2021, a statistic that reflects the number of cyber attacks orchestrated by Russian state threat actors following the invasion of Ukraine.
Google Cloud Cybershield is already in use in a number of countries, among them Kuwait, where the Central Agency for Information Technology (CAIT) is working on a similar federated national SOC to that planned in Bulgaria.
