A years-long partnership with the e-Governance Academy, building national cyber resilience through hands-on exercises across Moldova and the Western Balkans.
Building a country’s cyber defence capability is a long process that takes sustained work on skills, institutions and trust. The e-Governance Academy, an independent Estonian non-profit founded in 2002 that has worked in more than 130 countries, has spent years doing exactly that, and for much of its cybersecurity work it has partnered with CybExer. The clearest way to see what that partnership does is through the exercises the two have run together, beginning in Moldova.
The collaboration began by 2019 with joint projects in Moldova, and Moldova remains the engagement with the most on the record.
In June 2023, CybExer and EGA ran the Moldova Cybersecurity Capacity Building Exercise in Chisinau, an EU-backed event that brought together more than 30 cyber experts from the country’s public and private sectors. It ran in two parts: an individual, Jeopardy-style capture-the-flag day, with familiarisation training on the cyber range and tools such as MISP and Security Onion, followed by a one-and-a-half-day, team-based threat-hunting exercise in which blue teams investigated vulnerabilities and traced red team activity, closing with a hotwash that walked through the attackers’ campaign.
The feedback was emphatic. 83 per cent of participants said they had learned new defensive techniques, 97 per cent valued the realism of the cyber range, 93 per cent were satisfied with the hands-on technical content, and every participant rated the event highly and would recommend it. The aim reached beyond a single event, though: to help seed a lasting Moldovan cybersecurity community. Later the same year, a separate EU-supported live-fire exercise helped 29 members of Moldova’s armed forces build their ability to prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats.
The partnership’s reach shows most clearly in the Western Balkans. That same summer, EGA and CybExer ran a four-day live-fire cyber drill in Albania for teams from Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia, under the European Union’s Rapid Response Project to strengthen cyber resilience in the region. Thirty participants worked through a Jeopardy-style capture-the-flag day followed by three days of live-fire defence, gaining practical experience in defending IT systems under sustained simulated attack. The event drew unusually senior attention: the President of Estonia, Alar Karis, the President of Albania, Bajram Begaj, and the EU Ambassador to Albania observed it, a reminder that these exercises are as much about political commitment as technical skill.
“Practising response to cyber attacks in a crisis simulated environment is a good way to expand the cyber safety of our critical infrastructures and services.”
Merle Maigre, e-Governance Academy
The work has continued and widened. In November 2025, EGA and CybExer ran WB Cyber Connect 2025, billed as the first whole-of-region cyber defence exercise for the Western Balkans, bringing more than 60 experts together in Tallinn and online for a three-day live-fire exercise on the CybExer Cyber Range under the EU-funded Cyber Balkans project. Ukraine, where EGA has worked since 2012, sits alongside these as a long-running strand of the same relationship.
Cyber capacity building depends on partnerships that reach across governments and institutions.
Behind the exercises is a division of labour. EGA works through three pillars, governance, technology and people, and leads on the strategy, stakeholder engagement and donor coordination that a national programme needs. CybExer provides the cyber range on which users build and test their skills, along with the scenario delivery and the visualisation that makes an exercise legible. The exact split shifts from project to project, but the division has stayed consistent. CybExer’s part draws on experience built across more than 60 countries, including work with NATO, in designing large-scale exercises and running the cyber range and visualisation these events depend on. That complementarity, rather than either organisation working alone, is what has kept the partnership going for years.
What lasts beyond each project is the relationship. EGA returns to the same regions and expects to keep working in the Western Balkans for years to come. Projects may end, but the trust built through them continues, bringing the same people and institutions back together. With every new engagement, they build on what came before instead of starting anew.
The partnership works on two levels at once. The exercises themselves are hands-on and technical: capture the flag, threat hunting, tracing red team activity, incident response. Around them, EGA brings the governance side of resilience, national strategies, legislation, and the setting up of cybersecurity centres and security operations centres. The two reinforce each other, and they meet in one of CybExer’s real strengths: making a complex exercise legible to the people who set policy and budgets.
“Visualisation is often the aspect that most influences how security teams interact and how they communicate data. It also helps presidents, prime ministers, and national security advisers understand what is happening during an exercise.”
Merle Maigre, e-Governance Academy
An exercise that senior leaders can follow earns the political attention and funding national cyber capacity depends on, and heads of state have attended these events as a result.
The premise of the partnership is that cyber capacity cannot be built in isolation. It sits within a wider ecosystem of the European Union, NATO and international organisations, and it depends on drawing in the private sector, not just the state.
“It cannot happen exclusively in a state bubble. It must include private sector actors, both as partners and as part of the training audience. Critical infrastructure is often run by private companies, so they must be part of the solution.”
Merle Maigre, e-Governance Academy
The hardest problem, in Maigre’s view, is the persistent shortage of skilled people, which is not solved by training individuals alone but by building systems and ecosystems that keep learning over time. That is the space a long-term cyber range partnership is built to fill.
The e-Governance Academy and CybExer show what capacity building looks like when it is sustained: not a single exercise, but a series of them across Moldova, the Western Balkans and beyond, each building skills and relationships that outlast the event. Strong participant feedback and repeated engagement point the same way, and the pattern is the real story: the same partners returning to the same regions, building capability designed to endure.
