Dr. Krasimir Simonski served as National Cybersecurity Coordinator and Chair of the State eGovernment Agency of Bulgaria until 2022. His area of supervision included the ICT infrastructure of the State Administration and national security-related establishments, such as data centers, communication facilities and the National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT). Prior to this position, Dr. Simonski was Chair of the Bulgarian Research and Education Network (BREN), the Bulgarian partner in the pan European Research Network, a.k.a GEANT.
He has developed and managed successfully large scale IT projects, such as the UNDP Project Telecentres – a project, which received high international recognition for becoming a major national asset in the Government strategy for e-Inclusion, e-Skills, e-Government, and e-Business. He has also a solid business background in online travel as COO and international market analyst.. After he got his Ph.D. in Computer Networks in 1991, he served 12 years (until 2003) as a Director of Communications and Computing, and Adjunct Faculty in Computer Sciences at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG) – the first American university in Eastern Europe. Being one of the first Internet missionaries in the region since 1991, he has hundreds of keynote presentations in wide spectrum of information society topics but dominantly on social entrepreneurship, Cybersecurity, IPv6, e-Skills, e-Learning, online travel and others.
During the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2018, he chaired the Horizontal Working Party on Cyber Issues of the Council of the European Union, the Cooperation Group, the Network of CSIRTs, and ECSO’s NAPAC working group and in this capacity, he had a major contribution for the adoption of the EU Cybersecurity Act.