Pilots for the European Cybersecurity Competence Networks: how can your SME benefit? – Cyberwatching 6th webinar report

On the 2nd of April 2019, the cyberwatching.eu webinar on the European Cybersecurity Competence Network and Centre took place. It particularly targeted SMEs and aimed at demonstrating how can they benefit from the European Commission’s initiatives regarding the Competence Centre.

The main focus of the webinar was the four pilot projects - CONCORDIA, CyberSec4Europe, ECHO and SPARTA - which were launched earlier this year in order to operate a pilot for a European Cybersecurity Competence Network and to develop a common European Cybersecurity Research & Innovation Roadmap.

Pilot Projects to strength the EU's cybersecurity capacity and tackling future cybersecurity challenges

These four projects stressed their contribution to cybersecurity awareness raising and training: e.g., ECHO provides cyber skills reference model, while SPARTA raises awareness among different players including non-tech SMEs which have already ‘gone digital’ but have not been aware of cyber-threats.

On the other hand, CONCORDIA and CyberSec4Europe deliver targeted Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOOCs). This is particularly important because, as it has been highlighted during the webinar:

• Around 43% of cyber-attacks target small business, from which 60% of those that fell victims of cyberattacks, do not recover and shut down within 6 months;
• Only 1/3 of companies have cybersecurity policies, from which only 14% of them rate their ability to mitigate cyber risks, vulnerabilities and attacks as highly effective.

Standards and certification to support Cybersecurity

In addition, the importance of ICT standardisation for SMEs has been presented by StandICT projectrepresentatives. Besides the offer of StandICT, the four pilots also have something to propose in the field: for instance, Cyberse4Europe will aim at converting European tech knowledge accumulated through R&I actions to international standards, ECHO will collect and present sector specific security certification needs, SPARTA will facilitate certification of the novel tools.

Bringing EU in the front field of cybersecurity innovation

European cybersecurity SMEs are also lacking behind in a global competition: about 75% of the most innovative cybersecurity companies come from the US, while EU companies represent only 10%. Therefore, the European Commission, which was represented by Ms. Nineta Polemi (DG Connect, Unit H1 Cybersecurity technology and Capacity Building) expects that the four pilot projects contribute to the development of cybersecurity technological and industrial capacities and help to increase competitiveness of the Union cybersecurity industry.

How? some of the exemplary actions from the four cybersecurity pilot projects include:

• Start-up incubation/advisory services offered by CONCORDIA;
• CyberSec4Europe workplan with different industrial demonstrators, matching them with Blueprint Research;
• ECHO’s support to SMEs on sharing early warning system regarding cybersecurity related issues and use the E-FCR for experimental simulation of cyber-attack scenarios, pre-production testing, product evaluations, etc.;
• SPARTA by providing a full verified software stack which can serve in a variety of IoT devices.

However, these are only few of the key features from the four pilot projects. Much more benefits for SMEs will follow! If you have missed the latest cyberwatching.eu webinar you can see the recording (and download all the presentations).

Checkthe video and the PowerPoint presentations available on the webinar page