First-Ever Regional Cyber Endeavor Seminar Held in Montenegro

“Zdravo” from Podgorica, Montenegro! This is Will Poole from the International Cyber Engagement office at Headquarters, United States European Command.                                

I spent last week in the warm and hospitable city of Podgorica, Montenegro, with a EUCOM team executing the first-ever regional Cyber Endeavor event.

To reinforce the understanding of what Cyber Endeavor is and why we do it, allow me to reiterate here:

Cyber Endeavor is the United States European Command's paramount cyber security collaboration, familiarization and engagement program designed to strengthen partner nation cyber defense capacities through seminars, events and exercise support.  These cyber defense seminars go a long way towards building cyber defense partnerships with our partner nations with the end goal of improving force readiness for deployment in support of exercises, multinational crisis response and future missions.

Deputy Minister Mira Cerović, who is responsible for Development and Protection of Information and Communication Systems, opening the Cyber Endeavor Seminar along with Lt Col Božo Đurović, Acting Chief of Communication and Information System (J-6), General Staff.

From February 28 to March 1, two EUCOM-based subject matter experts -- James Nettesheim and John Riddlemoser -- provided a cyber defense seminar entitled “Malware Analysis & Reverse Engineering Malicious Software.”

Diverse Group of Participants. The Cyber Endeavor Seminar included technical experts from Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and the United States. (See this link below for translated Montenegrin Armed Forces article and photograph of Cyber Endeavor participants.)

We had 25 cyber defense subject matter experts from 15 nations involved in this Cyber Endeavor event. The seminar was three days long and covered the basics of malware and malicious code, vulnerabilities and exploits, investigative techniques, on-line tools and resources.  The participants also learned about disassembling executables, obfuscation, malicious document analysis, creation of intrusion detection system (IDS) signatures and other malware defenses.

James Nettesheim and John Riddlemoser providing some hands-on help.

What’s next? Cyber Endeavor Seminar #2 will be hosted in Vilnius, Lithuania, April 17 – 19. The seminar is entitled “Incident Response and Network Forensics” and topics will include an overview of proper incident response procedures to include identification, containment and preservation/restoration.  Incident identification will be presented using many examples from live network captures along with associated Intrusion Detection system products.  And lots more……

COL Thomas, Lt Col Božo Đurović, the EUCOM team and all the Cyber Endeavor participants after closing ceremony.

And after that? In September, we will execute Seminar #3 (focused on computer forensics) at Grafenwöhr, Germany, and also our Capstone event with two tracks (Management and Technical) offering many diverse seminars. 

I’ll keep you posted as things move along. If you have any questions or comments, contact the International Cyber Engagement (ICE) team at ICE@eucom.mil

Will Poole
International Cyber Engagement