The staff of the Secretariat of the Central Election Commission was trained on the use of innovative cybersecurity systems introduced in the Commission through completion of two specialised training courses held on 18 – 22 March 2024 with the support of the Council of Europe*. These trainings were held upon the request of the Central Election Commission given the escalating number of cyber-attacks targeting the information systems of Ukrainian state authorities in the context of ongoing war and the need to ensure the protection of respective cybersecurity systems of the Commission. Respective training sessions are aimed to strengthen the capacity of the institution to deal with the current and possible future cyber-attacks.

In the framework of the first training on “IBM QRadar SIEM Foundations”, participants learnt about the solution architecture, how to navigate the user interface, and how to investigate offenses. They also got acquainted with the methods of information search and analysis from which QRadar concludes a suspicious activity.

The second training on “IBM QRadar SIEM Advanced Topics” enabled participants to learn about QRadar custom log sources, reference data collections and custom rules, X-Force data and the Threat Intelligence app, UBA and QRadar Advisor, tuning and custom action scripts.

The mentioned training courses became the first in a planned series of specialised cyber security trainings to be held in the coming months with the support of the Council of Europe to enhance the Commission's specialists' expertise, thereby boosting the stability, security, and reliability of the information resources of the institution.

* The specialised IT-trainings on cyber security are organised within the framework and with the support of the Council of Europe project “Supporting democratic post-war elections in Ukraine”, implemented within the framework of the Council of Europe Action Plan for Ukraine “Resilience, Recovery and Reconstruction” 2023 – 2026.