From January 19 to 23, 2026, the NATO Advanced Training Course (ATC) «Cybersecurity and Ethical Hacking» was held at Northumbria University, the United Kingdom. The course brought together 35 participants from Ukraine, including representatives of Lviv Polytechnic National University, partner universities, the National Bank of Ukraine, the Lviv Regional Military Administration, and specialists from leading Ukrainian IT companies.
The event was implemented with the financial support of the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme. The project manager from the Ukrainian side was Professor Ivan Opirskyi, Head of the Department of Information Protection, the Institute of Computer Technologies, Automation and Metrology, Lviv Polytechnic.
The course was an extremely intensive and practice-oriented, with productive week of learning and international collaboration. The programme covered the full life cycle of penetration testing and included key areas such as the fundamentals of ethical hacking; scoping and management of security projects; cyber intelligence; vulnerability analysis; social engineering; operation of network and application systems; security of cloud and IoT solutions; post-operational analysis techniques; and cyber incident response.
The training was conducted by academic and industry experts with an emphasis on practical laboratory work, real-life cases and the development of professional reporting skills, which is critically important for modern cybersecurity professionals. Not only representatives of Northumbria University were involved in the course, but also lecturers from the Department of Information Protection, Lviv Polytechnic, Associate Professor Andrian Piskozub and Senior Lecturer Ivan Kolbasynskyi, who have a direct relationship with ethical hacking.
On the part of Northumbria University, the project was led by Biju Issac, Director of the Academic Center of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR), who involved specialists from the Northumbria Cyber Clinic, as well as representatives of DXC Technology and CoreTech Security. The training took place on the basis of the modern campus of the Northumbria University Cyber Security Center and was held in an intensive format – from morning to evening.
As part of the visit, the Lviv Polytechnic delegation also held working meetings with Professor Shaun Lawson, Head of the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Northumbria University, and Professor John Woodward, Pro Vice-Chancellor, International & Faculty of Science and Environment, who provided active and consistent support for cooperation with the Ukrainian side.
The result of the advanced training course will be the preparation and publication of a book on ethical hacking in the NATO Science Series, as well as the launch of new research and educational partnerships between Northumbria University and Lviv Polytechnic National University, which opens up new opportunities for the development of international cooperation in the field of cybersecurity.
