Israeli cyber industry sets up shop in Vilnius

Rytis Rainys, the head of Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), profited from his attendance at Innotech, the Israeli internal security conference in Tel Aviv on 18 November, to seek areas to work together with his Israeli counterpart Buky Carmeli, the head of the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD).

The two countries have close connections in the cyber and intelligence fields, as illustrated by the Lithuania-based Thetabyte, founded and headed by Israeli businessman Shay Tal, which develops open source intelligence (OSINT) and big data analysis solutions at its offices in Kaunas, with rear bases in Israel and Montenegro. Thetabyte developed the WebMine2Go platform, which collects data on social networks and the clear-, dark- and deepwebs, and analyses it to identify connections. The company also promotes more hardcore services such as tactical interception of communications to monitor the behaviour of online targets.

Vilnius, vidi, vici

The Israeli cybersecurity firm TeraSky and cyber training firm Cybergym are also in Lithuania. Cybergym, founded and headed by Ofir Hason, the former head of the technical branch of the National Information Security Authority (which was absorbed by the Israel National Cyber Directorate), partnered in 2017 with the Baltic telecommunications company Telia Lietuva to create a training centre in Vilnius.

TeraSky, Cybergym and a third company, the US firm Cybereason, which was founded by former Israel Defense Forces officers Lior Div and Yonatan Striem-Amit, have relied on the Lithuanian connections of local business diplomacy veteran Sergejus Titarenko of the firm Electri commercium to develop their activities in the country.