“The European Commission is Lithuania’s key partner in EU cyber security area, we are cooperating closely on both, implementation of EU directives, and development and financing of new initiatives. It is also important for us to strengthen our partnership with the European Commission unit on experience-sharing in the area of election security,” Vice Minister E. Kerza said inviting DG CONNECT representatives to come on a work visit to Lithuania in the nearest while.
Three elections will take place in Lithuania in 2019, therefore election security is a very current issue, according to Vice Minister E. Kerza. “We cooperate closely and share experience with our partners from other allied nations, at the same time, our lessons learned will be available to both, EU countries and the European Commission next year,” E. Kerza said.
Vice Minister also presented at the meeting the consolidation of cyber capabilities of Lithuania’s public sector and progress made in the development of international initiatives.
“Not only does Lithuania conduct a consolidation of national cybersecurity capabilities, we also invest into international cooperation, especially the developed EU rapid response teams. We are happy to find that almost half of all the EU members are already a part of this project we lead, and others are considering the possibility to join,” E. Kerza said and stressed that a new flexible cyber defence capability will significantly enhance the security of EU member states and institutions.
Lithuania leads the EU project of cooperation on cyber defence, eight EU members – Estonia, Spain, Croatia, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Romania, and Finland, are participants of the project, and four more EU members – Belgium, Greece, Slovenia, and Germany, are observers. The Lithuania’s initiative aims at creating EU cyber rapid response teams which would rotate on a six-month basis and would be formed by professionals of cyber incident investigation and other security institutions of the participating countries. The Lithuanian-proposed initiative on formation of cyber rapid response force and mutual assistance in cyber security area proposed by Lithuania is one of the 17 projects approved under the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) framework by the Council of the EU in late 2017.
