Bulgaria’s cybersecurity leadership reflects a country balancing fast-growing tech and fintech ecosystems with the realities of critical infrastructure and government modernization. The result is a security community shaped by two strong forces: private-sector operators building scalable programs for high-velocity businesses, and public-sector leaders protecting sensitive services and national data. The profiles below highlight CISOs and security heads pushing maturity forward across cloud, iGaming, banking, digital trust, and government.
Alex Smirnoff — Chief Information Security Officer, SOAX
Alex Smirnoff is CISO at SOAX, with more than 30 years of experience spanning security governance, audits, risk and vulnerability management, compliance, and incident prevention. He is also CISO and co-founder at ARMA Instruments AG, a company focused on high-security communications devices. Earlier, he served as the first CISO in Parallels’ history, building governance and risk frameworks and driving initiatives such as ISO 27001 certification and continuous vulnerability management programs.
Yegor Malinovskiy — Chief Information Security Officer, Delasport
Yegor Malinovskiy is CISO at Delasport, bringing a background rooted in security operations and security architecture. Prior to this role, he led global security operations at Sapiens and served as an IT security architect at The Israeli Phoenix. He also spent several years at Check Point in escalation engineering and project management roles, reflecting hands-on exposure to enterprise security tooling and real-world incident/problem resolution at scale.
Vasil Kanev — Chief Information Security Officer, Ministry of Environment and Water of Bulgaria
Vasil Kanev is a cybersecurity expert at Bulgaria’s Ministry of Environment and Water, focused on policy, administrative risk, and the integrity of environmental data and systems. His work emphasizes protecting high-stakes datasets tied to air quality, water resources, waste management, and radiation background—where reliability directly affects public trust and crisis response. He brings broad technical experience across system administration, media IT environments, industrial software, and early e-government initiatives.
Daniela Dimitrova — Chief Information Security Officer, Ministry of Culture
Daniela Dimitrova serves as CISO at Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture, holding the role since 2014. Her long tenure suggests sustained responsibility for information security governance and controls within a public institution that must balance accessibility, preservation, and operational continuity. Her work is positioned at the intersection of government processes, institutional data protection, and maintaining secure service delivery for cultural administration.
Miglen Evlogiev — Chief Information Security Officer, Evrotrust
Miglen Evlogiev is CISO at Evrotrust and President of the Bulgarian Cybersecurity Association. He describes experience spanning cloud, fintech, and enterprise security, including helping build AWS managed security capability early in his career. Alongside executive security leadership, he has been active in Bulgaria’s security community through events such as OWASP Sofia and BSides Sofia—supporting collaboration, talent growth, and practical security knowledge-sharing across the ecosystem.
Pavlin Chervenkov — Chief Information Security Officer, WOGI
Pavlin Chervenkov is CISO at WOGI, with a strong infrastructure and operations background. Before stepping into the CISO role, he spent nearly a decade as a Senior System Administrator at TMDHosting and earlier worked in system administration roles focused on infrastructure operations. His profile points to a practitioner-leader shaped by hands-on systems work, operational reliability, and the day-to-day realities of securing production environments.
Dragomir Nikolov — Chief Information Security Officer, Bulgarian Export Insurance Agency
Dragomir Nikolov is CISO at the Bulgarian Export Insurance Agency (BAEZ). While his background includes commercial and business development roles, his current position places him at the center of safeguarding a government-linked institution tied to national trade and export risk. This role typically requires balancing operational needs with governance, policy, and security controls that protect sensitive financial and partner information.
Stoyan Popov — Chief Information Security Officer, Amusnet
Stoyan Popov is CISO at Amusnet, bringing a blend of consulting and hands-on industry leadership. He describes more than 16 years of experience leading high-performing technical teams and serving as a trusted advisor to boards and executive leadership. His emphasis on strategic adoption of new technologies and brand/organizational trust signals a CISO profile focused on aligning security with growth, reputation, and operational performance.
Alexander Klassanov — Country Chief Information Security Officer, United Bulgarian Bank
Alexander Klassanov is Country CISO at United Bulgarian Bank, leading information security at the country level and covering UBB Bank, DZI group companies, and UBB Interlease. He brings more than 20 years in IT and roughly a decade in information security, with a focus on embedding security into business decision-making. His remit suggests governance-heavy leadership across a regulated financial environment with multiple entities and shared risk.
Bulgaria and the Leaders Driving Security Maturity
Across these profiles, Bulgaria’s cybersecurity leadership is clearly multi-track: cloud and tech operators building scalable programs, iGaming and fintech leaders managing fast-moving risk, banking CISOs reinforcing governance and resilience, and public-sector security heads protecting institutional trust and national data. Together, they represent the practical core of Bulgaria’s cyber capability—leaders who translate policy and strategy into controls that actually hold up in production.