Hello and welcome to the special podcast series, which takes a look at cybersecurity during this global pandemic known as COVID-19.

I'm Peter Ballant from Technicon, and throughout this series, we will be speaking with partners from the Sparta Project.

You may recall from previous podcast episodes that Sparta is a relatively new project, which will improve the way Europe does cybersecurity.

From training and education to engaging the development community, Sparta is committed to implementing lasting change.

Cybersecurity is akin to the COVID-19 pandemic in the impact that could take place due to a breach or outbreak.

Shut down, loss of commerce, and public fear are just a few of the effects, both a pandemic and a large-scale cyber attack could yield.

In this series, we will look at the intersection of those two vulnerable sectors of our society

and what is being done on the cybersecurity side to keep things running safely and securely.

Today, we speak with Rina Stamboliska remotely from her home office in Paris.

She is the VP of governance and public affairs at Yes We Hack,

which is Europe's first bug bounty platform.

Relax, these are the good hackers.

In fact, Yes We Hack is a network of over 15,000 ethical hackers from around the world who look for vulnerabilities in the cyber systems of organizations and then makes recommendations on how to fix them.

Yes, we hack has a partnership role in Sparta, but also lately they have become quite active with remediation methods for COVID-19 in the way of auditing security in contact tracing software.

Welcome, Raina.

Thank you.

I have to ask, what were your first thoughts when you learned that a pandemic was upon us?

Well, you know, there is one thought which is a very human, very immediate thought, that is how, you know, how are we going to handle the good health and safety of ourselves and our relatives and loved ones?

You know, that's a very human thing.

And then the second thing is, okay, what can I do about this? You know, what can I do to help? So there have been a lot of initiatives where many people, including, you know, to chime in and to just say, look, here's what I can do.

Just, you know, do not hesitate to reach out and ask for help.

And so we've been curating data.

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