IBM has secured a contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide cybersecurity support in European and Eurasian countries.
The deal includes a $26 million in initial funding to support the agency’s Cybersecurity Protection and Response program, which helps strengthen cybersecurity across government and critical infrastructure and bolster information sharing in Europe and Eurasia.
Under the five-year contract, IBM will deploy a multidisciplinary team to Albania, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Moldova and other countries where USAID operates. This group of consultants will assist government agencies and critical infrastructure operators in detecting, responding to, recovering and protecting from cyberattacks.
According to Alice Fakir, partner and head of federal cybersecurity services for IBM Consulting, countries that wish to reap the benefits of digitalization and modernization must have cyber threat mitigation processes in place.
“Cybersecurity is officially a global development challenge, and IBM is proud to partner with USAID by supporting the integration of cybersecurity across a host country’s civilian IT infrastructure,” she said.
The partnership comes amid numerous hacking incidents affecting Europe.
In late 2023, Kyivstar, the largest telecommunications provider in Ukraine, was targeted in a cyberattack that temporarily brought down its communication network, an incident the country’s cybersecurity officials blamed on the Russian state-controlled hacker group Sandworm. In early May, the Polish government revealed it was targeted by APT28, another Russian hacker group that Germany and the Czech Republic say also attacked them around the same time.