Cybersecurity regulation in Turkmenistan (2026)

President Berdimuhamedov approved a Law on Cybersecurity in 2019 to protect national 'cyber sovereignty'; it sets the order and specifics for securing information infrastructure in strategically important spheres and to prevent the use of cyberspace for terrorist, military and other unlawful purposes.

The law covers national information resources processed in communication systems used by state bodies, local self-government, law enforcement and military, and in e-government, e-commerce and e-document management; communication systems of all forms of ownership are subject to its cybersecurity requirements.

Turkmenistan has adopted successive State Cybersecurity Programs (2017–2021 and 2022–2025, the latter approved by presidential decree at the State Security Council), implemented chiefly through the State Cybersecurity Service established in 2019 under the Turkmenaragatnashyk communications agency.

The State Cybersecurity Service has no website and does not publish annual reports or cybersecurity-incident statistics, and Turkmenistan has no officially recognized national CIRT/CERT; detailed breach-notification or incident-reporting duties are not publicly documented.

A Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence opened in October 2022 at the Institute of Telecommunications and Informatics in Ashgabat with OSCE support, and Turkmenistan has pursued cooperation on cybersecurity and cybercrime/e-evidence with the OSCE and partners such as South Korea's KISA.

Despite the formal law, Turkmenistan scores very low on the National Cyber Security Index (around 7.79/100 in the 2022 assessment), and the full legal text, regulations and state programs are not made publicly available, limiting visibility into concrete obligations.