CEE: The Cybersecurity Hub at the Heart of Europe

Joanna Swiatkowska, PhD, is Secretary-General at European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO). She was a Director in the Supply Chain Cyber team, CISO at UBS from 2020 to 2022. She was the initiator and Programme Director of the European Cyber Security Forum – CYBERSEC from 2014 to 2019. In addition, she worked as an assistant professor at the AGH University of Science and Technology from 2018 to 2020. She was a long-term employee of the Kosciuszko Institute where she served as a cyber security expert and where she created a programme dedicated to the analysis of cyber security issues. She was named among the 100 “rising stars of technology in Eastern Europe” by the Financial Times & New Europe 100 in 2017, and was also included in the “20 top women in cyber security in 2019” – a poll organised by the Women in Tech Summit.

Razvan Todor is VP of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances, CSG, at Bitdefender, a global cybersecurity leader that provides security solutions and advanced threat protection services to millions of users in more than 170 countries, from regular consumers to the world’s largest corporations. Razvan has 15+ years experience in managing large, cross-functional and distributed teams. He comes from a strong product management background with roots in agile methodologies and UI experience & design. He has overseen or was directly involved in launching top-of-the-line B2C and B2B2C products for the past 8 years, including Bitdefender BOX and the Bitdefender IoT Security Platform, as well as co-branded solutions such as NETGEAR Armor powered by Bitdefender. His current focus is on building and expanding The Bitdefender Subscriber Protection Platform – Bitdefender’s B2B2C platform – through strategic partnerships with top telcos and leading companies in the IoT & smart home cybersecurity markets.

Przemyslaw Deba is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Orange Polska and a member of the ECSO CISO Community, ISSA, and CSO Council. With over 20 years of international experience in cybersecurity, he has led the development and transformation of large-scale SOCs, MSSP services, and automated threat detection platforms across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He played a key role in shaping the Orange Group’s global cybersecurity strategy and launched award-winning initiatives such as “CyberTarcza.” Passionate about innovation, digital sovereignty, and regional collaboration, he actively contributes to building cybersecurity capacity in the Central and Eastern European region.

Robert Sefr is the CTO and Co-Founder of Whalebone, Consortium Leader of DNS4EU and a global leader providing cybersecurity solutions and products to telcos, ISPs, critical-infrastructure enterprises, government, and public institutions. After graduating from IT & Security, he joined McAfee VAD Comguard as an IT security consultant and rose to the position of Comguard CTO. His main motivation behind Whalebone is to build a security solution available to broad masses with the best possible user experience, because he believes that cybersecurity is a human right, not a privilege.