SEI and the U.S. Department of State Help Define National Ukrainian Digital Defense Strategy

July 20, 2026—In collaboration with the U.S. Department of State, a team from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) partnered this spring with officials from Ukraine to develop a chief information security officers (CISOs) academy to better train members of the Ukrainian national government’s cyber workforce. Participants of the workshop, held in Warsaw, Poland, outlined a curriculum that will become part of the Ukrainian CISO Campus, a national platform for training public-sector cybersecurity leaders and specialists.

This workshop, funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, is part of the SEI’s mission to provide the United States government and its partners with the latest cybersecurity research and engineering. “As the Trump administration has made clear, the United States will provide targeted foreign assistance when it is in our national interest, including in Ukraine,” said Shawn Powers, director of communications for the Office of the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs in the U.S. Department of State.

Advancing Practices from Defense to Resilience

In November 2025, Ukraine’s cyber agency, the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (SSSCIP), partnered with the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation (MDT) to launch the CISO Campus. This effort complements the broader U.S. government cybersecurity portfolio in Ukraine, including the U.S. Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure Activity, which supports the SSSCIP Qualification Center and applied CISO and CDTO training across Ukrainian public institutions. “The platform aims to cultivate a new generation of leaders capable of building a culture of cyber resilience and integrating security into daily governance processes,” according to an SSSCIP release.

This investment in the government’s cybersecurity workforce supports the wartime expansion of Ukraine’s cyber capabilities from defense to threat detection and rapid recovery. Increasing the resilience of critical infrastructure and digital services requires contributions from everyone in the cyber workforce, from specialists to managers. To answer this need, the CISO Campus aims to teach managerial, analytical, and practical cybersecurity skills.

The SEI’s deep expertise in each of those categories is one reason the MDT partnered with the institute to develop the training program. For decades the SEI has leveraged technical knowledge in areas such as vulnerability discovery and incident response to help foreign governments and economies develop cyber capacity. But it also brings to bear experience in enterprise risk mitigation and organizational management.

“No two countries that we partner with are the same,” said Justin Novak, an SEI senior cybersecurity operations researcher who leads the SEI’s cyber capacity development team. “The SEI has the capability to flex to the need.” The SEI team in Warsaw included experts in security operations and executive education.

Tailoring a Cyber Curriculum

The SEI team also included specialists in instructional design and workshop facilitation. Over four days, the team met virtually and in person with officials from the MDT. SEI facilitators used a design thinking methodology to ensure the CISO Campus cybersecurity curriculum is practical, scalable, and grounded in the real needs of Ukraine’s public sector. Rather than starting from predefined course content, the workshop was structured around iterative, participant-driven design.

Together the participants identified curriculum goals and particulars. The curriculum’s topics will include security operations, incident response, cyber risk management, and the role of AI in cybersecurity. The intended students are current or aspiring CISOs, incident response managers, and leaders or specialists in computer security incident response teams and security operation centers.

The SEI and partners from the Ukrainian MDT, SSSCIP, and Chief Digital Transformation Officer Campus will create a pre-requisite pilot course, to be ready later in 2026. The effort will define their approach to developing the complete CISO Campus curriculum over the next two years.

Security Development Partnership to Extend Beyond the Curriculum

The CISO Campus engagement sparked an ongoing partnership between the SEI and the Ukrainian cyber agencies. SEI experts will help SSSCIP develop training in AI security and industrial control systems security for Ukrainian public-sector leaders in critical infrastructure.

The two organizations will also conduct regular information exchanges on the latest cyber threats to the Ukrainian public and private sectors. “We have capacity-building capabilities to share with them, but we’re also very interested to learn lessons from what the Ukrainians are seeing every day in their operational setting,” said Novak. “They’re very much at the cutting edge.”

Learn more about the SEI’s cybersecurity operations capacity development. Contact us at info@sei.cmu.edu for information on setting up a workforce development workshop.