The H2020 project ENSURESEC – End-to-end Security of the Digital Single Market’s e-commerce and Delivery Service Ecosystem celebrated the successful conclusion of its activities with a public final conference. Renowned experts from European organisations emphasized the importance of e-commerce ecosystem security and the merits of ENSURESEC through exciting keynote speeches and an insightful panel discussion Stakeholders, representing the e-commerce and cyber security domains, learned from the consortium how this ecosystem can be better protected against cyber-physical attacks and how the socio-technical solution developed in the project aims to do that.
After 24 months of research and development the consortium of 22 partners from 14 European countries finalized the work on the development of a comprehensive security toolkit for e-commerce infrastructures as well as the other activities, such as an awareness and training campaign. They presented their results in an online closing conference on May 20th, 2022.
Keynote speeches included talks about the e-commerce ecosystem security from different perspectives, as well as the role of EC-funded R&D activities to improve the security of the Union while ensuring strategic autonomy.
In a comprehensive overview, Luís Júdice Sousa from project coordinator INOV explained to the audience how ENSURESEC combines the toolkit, including cyber-physical threat monitoring and impact assessment, with a large-scale training and awareness campaign to educate e-commerce customers on cyber-security and the main threats that can arise in online shopping, in order to improve the resilience of the ecosystem.
The consortium members presented more detailed overview of the ENSURESEC platform protection, both by design, as well as through continuous monitoring, response, recovery and mitigation measures at run-time. Three ENSURESEC Pilots were also presented, with scenarios ranging from cyber-attacks on an e-commerce platform, over physical attacks on a pharmacy e-commerce operator, to cascading cyber-physical attacks on e-commerce infrastructure. Besides technical solutions, improving awareness was an important part of the project, and a new website becyberaware.eu, which contains comprehensive training materials, was also presented. This site aims to raise awareness for potential threats exploiting human vulnerabilities and to show measurements for identifying and avoiding those threats. The site is accompanied by an extensive social media campaign, which uses over 100 illustrations and training videos to reach different target groups. The ENSURESEC project and the future of the e-commerce ecosystem security landscape was the focus of the events panel discussion that closed the event, that also counted with presentation of external initiatives and projects, such as Led by Emiliano Anzelotti (ABI Lab), Jan Billiet (booking.com) and Rigo Van den Broeck (Mastercard) from the ENSURESEC advisory board discussed together with consortium members from IOTA, ATOS and SONAE about challenges the project faced during its run time, the opportunities for the future and valuable lessons learned.
A final conference was not only a great chance to talk in great detail about the project, but also to showcase the work of other related projects. Therefore, ENSURESEC invited Habtamu Abie (Norwegian Computing Center) to talk as a representative about the European Cluster for Securing Critical Infrastructures (ECSCI), the PRAETORIAN (Protection of Critical Infrastructures from advanced combined cyber and physical threats) project, REWIRE – Cybersecurity Skills Alliance and the PALANTIR (Practical Autonomous Cyberhealth for resilient SMEs & Microenterprises) projects.
To wrap up the conference and also the ENSURESEC project itself, Luís Júdice Sousa presented a final set of lessons learned, accompanying the technologies and ideas developed in the last two years as valuable input
for other present and future projects, that aim to improve the security of e-commerce and other critical infrastructures. Together with stakeholders from the Advisory Board and other external partners, the ENSURESEC consortium will continue discussing and seeking opportunities to further mature the developed solutions and bring them to the market. Moreover, the becyberaware.eu website will remain online to continue raising awareness for e-commerce customers and improving their ability to avoid threats.
For more information please visit:
ENSURESEC Website: http://www.ensuresec.eu/
LinkedIn: ENSURESEC
Twitter: ensuresec_eu
About ENSURESEC
ENSURESEC is an project in the EU Horizon 2020 programme under the topic SU-INFRA01-2018-2019-2020 – Prevention, detection, response and mitigation of combined physical and cyber threats to critical infrastructure in Europe, and part of the programmes H2020-EU.3.7.4. – Improve cyber security and H2020-EU.3.7.2. – Protect and improve the resilience of critical infrastructures, supply chains and tranport modes. The project, with 22 partners from all over Europe, has an overall budget of 9.2 Million Euro and has received a funding contribution from the EU of 7.7 Million Euro. ENSURESEC started on June 1st 2020 and ended on May 31st 2022, and it is coordinated by INOV from Portugal.
