A unique cybersecurity offering and solution for EU Local Public Administrations

In an age of ongoing digital transformation, cyber-crime has quickly become today’s fastest-growing form of criminal activity. 43%* of online attacks are now aimed at small businesses - yet only 14% of SMEs have made preparations to defend themselves. They are increasingly recognising the need to start making cybersecurity a top priority.

CS-AWARE (A cybersecurity situational awareness and information sharing solution for local public administrations based on advanced big data analysis) provides a cybersecurity situational awareness software solution for Local Public Administrations (LPAs) for the detection, classification and visualisation of cybersecurity incidents in real-time, supporting the prevention or mitigation of cyber-attacks. Its main features are “Anomaly/Threat detection, Information Correlation, Healing/Self-Healing, Information Sharing, Compliance Monitoring, Versatile Connectivity and Knowledge Management”.

Our project brings a unique cybersecurity offering and solution for EU Local Public Administrations (LPAs) in the area of vulnerabilities and attacks awareness, detection as well as mitigation and (self)healing. While facilitating a deeper understanding of possible vulnerabilities and attacks in their respective organizations, we also allow LPAs to see their IT structure from a completely new angle and reflect upon strengthening and improving their IT defences.

- Juha Röning, CS-AWARE Project Coordinator

Solution for future cybersecurity research and LPA development

CS-AWARE technical and commercial results will provide a basis for future cyber-security research and commercialization developments for the Local Public Administration within the EU area. Its open-source and commercial elements of the solution will be available for testing and demonstration to any interested parties. Furthermore, our lessons learned both technically and commercially will be available to anyone interested in understanding and designing future policies and R&D effort in the cyber-security area.

The CS-AWARE project will make a difference to potential end-users by:

Reducing the burden and the cost of personnel dealing with security
Reducing the dependency on the IT Team
Personalising for unique particularities specific to LPAs/SMEs
Being affordable and easily adaptable to the business needs of LPAs & SMEs
Having 100% End-user control over the system’s responses
Utilising a simple interface that will enable prompt reaction to incidents
Integrating self-healing and information-sharing components
Combining and correlating different data: Proprietary data collected from within LPAs / Relevant data from competent authorities’ sources / Alt-data from social media networks