Three Seas proposes regional cybersecurity hub

The Atlantic Council proposes a Three Seas Cybersecurity Center to protect critical infrastructure investments across twelve Central and Eastern European nations.

The Atlantic Council's report advocates for establishing a regional cybersecurity hub to protect critical infrastructure investments across the Three Seas Initiative's twelve member states in Central and Eastern Europe. The initiative has channeled focus into forty-eight interconnection projects spanning energy, digital, and transport sectors, with major cloud providers like Microsoft and Google investing billions in regional data centers. The proposed center would focus on operational security, information-sharing, international cooperation, skills development, and standardization across participating nations including Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

The report highlights the region's exposure to state-sponsored cyber threats, particularly given its proximity to Russia and history of offensive cyber operations targeting military and civilian infrastructure. Since 2015, suspected Russia-backed actors have conducted espionage and reconnaissance campaigns against Baltic energy networks. The proposed cybersecurity center would leverage cloud computing adoption to provide a common technology base for threat intelligence sharing and coordinated vulnerability response. Implementation would follow a phased approach: first establishing threat intelligence sharing and operational security procedures, then implementing incident response protocols, and finally focusing on security planning and standardization across the diverse twelve-nation region.

Source reporting: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/collective-cybersecurity-for-the-three-seas