Cybersecurity attacks present one of the biggest threats to society today. Governments and industry alike exert great effort to frustrate these attacks them, frequently at an international level.
Researchers at the COMAND Technology Gateway – Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT) – have been working on Protective (Proactive Risk Management through Improved Cyber Situational Awareness), a European Union Horizon 2020 collaborative project that aims to combat the growth of cybercrime. The project began in September 2016 and runs until August 2019.
The main objective of the project is to improve the awareness of the risk posed by cybersecurity attacks by creating a system for data and security information collection and processing, as well as by sharing information between security teams in different organisations. In addition to coordinating the project consortium, Athlone Institute of Technology is developing tools to link an organisation’s business goals to its computing infrastructure to enable the security teams to quickly focus on the most significant cyber threats.
The project, now its final year, will pilot Protective next year with several European National Research and Education Networks as well as several Managed Security Service providers in Ireland and the UK. Sharing of Information on attacks with other network monitoring organisations will enable enhanced threat awareness and decision-making capabilities.