A new report assessing Serbia’s cybersecurity capacity has found that the country has a strong understanding of existing gaps and opportunities for capacity building.
The report released by the World Bank has found that Serbia has undertaken critical steps in cybersecurity and performs well across many areas of cybersecurity capacity.
The report has found that:
- Serbia has a substantial commitment to addressing the challenges of cybersecurity and has a strong cybersecurity policy and legal foundation, which has enabled the country to create protection mechanisms – including the National CERT – that can ensure the resiliency of critical infrastructure across the country.
- Serbia has substantial capacity to develop cybersecurity expertise – both through professional development and academic channels facilitated by a growing technology industry in the country.
- Strong industry demand for cybersecurity skills creates challenges for government retention of cybersecurity professionals – an area the study suggests should be addressed.
- Areas cited for improvement include strengthening public awareness of the risks to privacy posed by the Internet, as well as further adoption of cybersecurity standards and good practices in both small and large enterprises.
Stephen Ndegwa, World Bank’s country manager for Serbia, said: “We congratulate Serbia on successfully completing the CMM assessment, which will provide a benchmark for measuring the future advancement of cybersecurity and serve as a building block for a national consensus on a cybersecurity status-quo and future actions. We would like to commend Serbia for publishing the report, which will be a useful reference for both national and international stakeholders to understand the state of cybersecurity in Serbia.”
The assessment used the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CMM) methodology developed by the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC) of the University of Oxford.
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The CMM aims to enable governments to benchmark cybersecurity capacity across five dimensions:
- Policy and strategy;
- Cyberculture and society;
- Education, training and skills;
- Legal and regulatory frameworks; and
- Standards, organisations and technologies.
The CMM has to date been deployed in 80 countries.
“This was the tenth country in Europe that did a CMM review and it provided us with very interesting insights into our research on the maturity of cybersecurity capacity across the world. The gaps that the researchers have identified provide evidence for important needs which are not only specific to Serbia but which could also be observed in other countries around the globe, but in particular in the Western Balkan region,” adds Professor Michael Goldsmith, co-director of the GCSCC.
Learn more about the report.
