On 14th of September, the SecurIT project kicked off during a hybrid meeting in France, hosted by the coordinator Safe Cluster in Aix en Provence.
SecurIT is a European project funded under the H2020 Innosup programme, aiming at supporting and co-financing the development of collaborative projects allowing prototyping and experimentation of top-notch technological solutions in the field of Security, with respect of the nowadays ethics, legal, and social challenges.
2 open calls for collaborative projects will be launched within the project duration – the first one in early 2022 – through which 63 best-in-class innovative projects developed by 126 SMEs across Europe will be granted. For the 2 calls, EUR 3 521 000 funding in total is available.
The project is structured in three major axes:
Demand analyses (new use cases identification) on the security market, with integrators and end users (including industrial players, public authorities, and managers of critical infrastructures);
Identification of technological solutions in Europe (solutions and services for digital and physical security);
Matchmaking activities will be proposed by the European clusters of the project consortium, including HSD, to facilitate the consortium building for the applications to the 2 Open Calls that will be launched by SecurIT.
The project consortium is composed of 8 partners from 6 countries of which 7 clusters:
The project partners will engage their respective ecosystems and partners to identify their core needs regarding physical and digital security, and define the open call challenges, in order to select quality projects answering the real market needs. Workshops will be organised in this respect in Autumn 2021.
Data sharing is one of the key aspects of building a comprehensive cybersecurity concept within the T-SHARK programme. Shared cyber incident-related data, extracted using different technological tools; structured contextual information from different sources makes it possible to connect separate events, better understand targets and build situation awareness in the whole ecosystem.
The specially developed SPARTA Data Sharing infrastructure consists of the integration of two main existing sharing platforms: the “MISP Threat Sharing’’ systems and the “C3ISP Collaborative and Confidential Information Sharing and Analysis for Cyber Protection’’ system. The main frontend of the SPARTA Data Sharing Infrastructure will be represented by the MISP data-sharing platform because the MISP graphical user interface offers a wide number of functionalities to help users in their searches and analysis and, at the same time, it is very easy and intuitive to be used. Secondly, the data format used to represent events of interest in MISP allows users to efficiently represent even complex events, which include several objects and also attributes. Some data that needs to be stored in the SPARTA data-sharing infrastructure could be critical, sensitive, or require more advanced protection. To meet such advanced security requirements, these data will be stored on the C3ISP data-sharing platform, which provides advanced data protection support. The MISP platform, however, stores a sanitized version of such critical data, where the fields to be protected have been removed or anonymized, while the C3ISP platform stores the corresponding original data, protecting it by enforcing a proper privacy policy.
Such integration and partial automation provide new ways of data sharing and the value of such a solution is piloted in the T-SHARK programme to be demonstrated at the final stages of the SPARTA project.
The solution addresses one of the fundamental challenges of the EU cybersecurity ecosystem, having a diverse multi-stakeholders community (differ with mandates, functional scope, the geography of operations, size, area of expertise) it is highly difficult to address complex international incidents in a timely, well-coordinated and efficient manner. SPARTA Cybersecurity Incidents and Investigation Data Sharing infrastructure provide one of the cornerstone components. It enables a trusted way to exchange different elements in a controlled way including:
· raw data;
· information on cybersecurity incidents;
· investigative processes outputs;
· ML and AI algorithms;
· analysis products;
· supplementary data and relationship between different entities.
Having this information shared and made available among EU MS cybersecurity actors in a controlled way enables collaborative cross-border investigations and analysis of complex and high-risk cybersecurity threats. By exploiting and developing further it can become a significant component of future European Cybersecurity Network and a Competence Centre collaborative infrastructure.
More information: https://sparta.eu/news/2021-06-24-sparta-data-sharing-infrastructure.html
On June 15 2021, a remote Lion DC project results presentation event was organized by Lithuanian Cybercrime Center of Excellence for Training, Research and Education L3CE together with the project coordinator Mykolas Romeris University.
The two-and-a-half-year Lion DC project ends in early July, 2021.
Lion DC (Law Enforcement Technological Innovation Consolidation for Fight Against Online Drug Crimes) project aims to provide Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) with new skills, methodologies and tools in the fight against drug trafficking, given major discernible shifts in the utilisation of digital environments (e.g. traditional social media) regarding distribution and sale of drugs such as the increasingly widespread use of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies by organized crime. In order to enhance LEA capacity to identify the flow of drugs and key players involved, either to thwart criminal activity or to determine guilt after the fact, the project will: test the efficiency, unique capabilities, and shortfalls in the use of various forms of technology, as well as Open Source Intelligence Tools (OSINT); penetrate the Dark Web; develop novel ways of going beyond the widely used “follow the money” principle; and augment the identification and description of criminals by collating a wide range of sources, both open and closed. The key activity of the Lion DC initiative was real, case based, cross border exercising in drug criminality, which was enacted by LEA practitioners, providing opportunities for LEA together with academia to share expertise, methodologies and analytical capabilities; and to identify available tools and rank them on their feasibility and usefulness.
During the event L3CE experts have shared the results and outcomes of each working package of the project to representatives from Lithuanian Law Enforcement authorities. Participants also had an opportunity to hear about the other related initiatives and projects – European Anti-Cybercrime Technology Development Association EACTDA (https://eactda.eu), project GRACE – Global Response Against Child Exploitation (www.grace-fct.eu), EU-Hybnet project – a Pan European Network to Counter Hybrid Threats (https://euhybnet.eu) and ENSURESEC project – End-to-end Security of the Digital Single Market’s E-commerce and Delivery Service Ecosystem (www.ensuresec.eu).
The meeting was dedicated to disseminate the Lion DC outcomes, as well as to discuss further collaboration and sustainability of the results. The event was attended by project partners and representatives from Lithuanian law enforcement institutions: Financial Crime Investigation Service, Money Laundering Prevention Competence Center, Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau, Lithuanian Police Forensic Research Center, Police Department under the Ministry of the Interior, Vilnius County Police Headquarters, officials of Kaunas Police Community, Kaunas County Police Headquarters, Klaipėda County Police Headquarters, Klaipėda District Police Commissariat, Utena County Police Headquarters.
The several-hour meeting was beneficial to all participants, discussions on further collaboration started right after the event.
We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming two-day online closing event organized by the LION-DC consortium, which will take place on June 7-8, 2021 14:00-17:00 CEST. The agenda of the event can be found here.
Considering your interest on Security, Fight against Crime and Terrorism, Fight against Cybercrime and Fight against illegal traffickin fields, you are invited to join as a valuable attendee of this informative yet interactive online event organised by LION-DC Consortium.
What is LION-DC? The Lion DC project aims to provide Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) with new skills, methodologies and tools in the fight against drug trafficking, given major discernible shifts in the utilisation of digital environments (eg. traditional social media) regarding distribution and sale of drugs such as the increasingly widespread use of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies by organized crime. In order to enhance LEA capacity to identify the flow of drugs and key players involved, either to thwart criminal activity or to determine guilt after the fact, the project will: test the efficiency, unique capabilities, and shortfalls in the use of various forms of technology, as well as Open Source Intelligence Tools (OSINT); penetrate the Dark Web; develop novel ways of going beyond the widely used “follow the money” principle; and augment the identification and description of criminals by collating a wide range of sources, both open and closed. The key activity of the Lion DC initiative is real, case based, cross border exercising in drug criminality, which will be enacted by LEA practitioners, providing opportunities for LEA together with academia to share expertise, methodologies and analytical capabilities; and to identify available tools and rank them on their feasibility and usefulness.
Why attend the LION-DC closing conference? After almost 28 months of implementation LION-DC project is coming to an end. In the LION-DC closing conference, we are going to present the project’s various outcomes and findings, which were mainly focused on the fight against online drug crimes. More specifically, in this online event, the project’s five work packages will be presented along with the most important findings and outcomes each one extracted, in order to disseminate, in the best possible way, the acquired knowledge to all interested parties. Additionally, the second day of the closing conference will be dedicated to the promotion of collaboration among EU funded projects of similar interest. To that cause, various other projects that are actively involved in fields such as fight against crime and terrorism, cybercrime, and illegal transactions will participate in the part of the conference. The purpose of the presentations is to raise awareness, promote cooperation among EU funded projects and share results and knowledge. This part will also be a great opportunity to exploit the chances for future partnerships among various organizations and get informed about the latest news and priorities of European Commission in the field. Last but not least, there will be keynote speeches during both days of the conference which will offer valuable insights and knowledge to all attendees.
Registration It will be our great honor to have you as our guest and we hope you accept the invitation to attend this event. Registration is mandatory both for organizational and security reasons and the form below should be completed by both speakers and participants. You may register for the closing conference by following this link: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/liondc_closing_conference
For any other inquiries you may contact the consortium through: info@lion-dc.eu
Thank you for considering our invitation and we are looking forward to seeing you in our webinar.
Kindest Regards, the LION DC Consortium
LION DC project is funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund — Police, under grant agreement no 822616
Identification of requirements, definition of use cases and project architecture completed
After 10 months of work in the H2020 project End-to-end Security of the Digital Single Market’s E-commerce and Delivery Service Ecosystem (ENSURESEC), the partners reached with the definition of the platform’s architecture the second major milestone in the development of a cyber-physical solution for safeguarding the e-commerce landscape.
The consortium of 22 partners from 14 European countries is working together on a comprehensive security toolkit for e-commerce platforms that offers both suppliers and end customers effective protection for their data and products. This way, the project aims to contribute to the European vision of a reliable and trusted Digital Single Market.
ENSURESEC, as a socio-technical solution to protect the e-commerce activities of the European Digital Single Market, combines an automated and distributed open-source e-commerce protection toolkit, including cyber-physical threat monitoring and impact assessment, with a large-scale training and awareness campaign to educate e-commerce SMEs and citizens on cyber-security and improve the resilience of the ecosystem.
At the technical level of the toolkit, state-of-the-art tools and techniques are integrated into a platform so that e-commerce operations are protected both by design and through continuous monitoring, response, recovery, and mitigation measures at run-time. Latest generation distributed ledger technology provides a complete audit trail of security incidents, as well as a decentralised identity management system, ensuring trust and transparency of operations, and immutability of information. This combination of individual tools and awareness activities covers the following three areas to provide a comprehensive approach: Prevention and Monitoring, Response and Mitigation, Awareness and Training.
After completing the ecosystem risk assessment, which was the first major milestone, in October 2020, a team of ENSURESEC partners started working on the tasks necessary for the next major milestone , the definition of the platform architecture. Adrian Bradu from the work package leader SIMAVI is pleased with the progress: “We are so glad, that all the partners collaborated so well and finished the milestone on time, despite the encountered difficulties related to remote work conditions. Our work on the analysis of requirements and the definition of technical specifications and use cases is elementary for the projects architecture.”
The team responsible for the integrated platform analysed the social, privacy, ethical and legal constraints as well as best practices to deliver the requirements for the development of a secure platform that conforms to the relevant legislation. Those requirements will be used to guide the conduct of the ENSURESEC pilots.
In parallel to the identification of the legal and ethical requirements, the technical teams worked closely with the end users to match the project’s potential capabilities with the actual needs of practitioners. The close collaboration in these tasks allowed the consortium members to gather all the requirements and data needed to define credible scenarios for the project’s use cases. Additionally, the experts determined corresponding technical requirements for individual components of the platform. To meet the requirements of the current European market, the use cases that will be covered by the platform and its components were specified and adapted.
After achieving this important milestone, the teams will tackle the next two milestones of the project: Initial component and platform testing and the development of the tools’ prototypes.
Welcome to the fourth edition of the Lion DC project newsletter. Organisations all over the Europe were forced to adapt to the new era which derived from COVID-19 crisis. In this framework, LION DC consortium changed its time plan, schedule and sequence of actions, implementing innovative alternatives to successfully meet project’s goals, offering to LEAs useful training sessions and information in the best way possible. It’s been a while since the third issue of our newsletter, thus, going through the current version, you will find out plenty of consortium’s activities. The project team after the successful implementation of the first two trainings, has also completed the “Practitioners” training and second version of Train the Trainers (TtT) training, both organised virtually. The material and exercises provided to the trainees with an overview of the way to conduct an online drug crime investigation, starting from the fundamentals and going quite deep. This newsletter provides all the information you need to stay on track with the latest innovations and activities on tackling online drug crimes. Wish to find out more about the project? Go through this newsletter. Interested in getting involved? Have a look at the LION DC LinkedIn group and Twitter account, managed by consortium and at the Stakeholders Group section. Looking forward to getting you on board this project. Stay Safe!
On 31st of March 2021, the EU-HYBNET consortium held its first virtual Future Trends Workshop, #FTW. This workshop also marked the start of the EU-HYBNET month, which will gather the consortium and EU-HYBNET network around several interesting virtual events until the 28th of April 2021.
The first Future Trends Workshop, organized by Hybrid CoE, provided Practitioners, Industry, SMEs and academia with an opportunity to learn from the different speakers about Megatrends and European Security and measures to counter hybrid threats. Altogether, 50 participants from EU and Associated Countries joined the event.
The workshop included three breakout sessions where each participant had a chance to explore the future of the following topics:
1- Intelligent infrastructures – new IT and smart cities
2- New geography – changing identities and power relations
3- New drivers of the information domain – platforms ownership, flows and influence
L3CE experts were actively participating in the workshop. Edmundas Piesarskas was invited as a panellist to the first group. Participants were elaborating the theme of Intelligent infrastructures: Are cities of the future – smart or dangerous? EU development of a smarter urban culture. What hybrid threats are related with the urbanization?
Evaldas Bruze took a part in the third group where participants elaborated future trends of societal aspects. Evaldas also had an opportunity to overview and present the key points of the discussions to all participants of the event in the closing panel.
Overall, the first EU-HYBNET #FTW was a valuable opportunity to exchange insightful views between participants and keynote speakers. The attendees shared many crucial, fascinating perspectives on extremely important matters that will shape society’s future and contribute in countering hybrid threats.
If you are interested in joining EU-HYBNET’s network, you can read the associated information and apply on the project’s website.
For further information on the EU-HYBNET, you can follow the project through Twitter and LinkedIn.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 883054
Cross-projects collaboration workshop held on 9 March 2021 marked the beginning of cooperation between 2 EU projects “End-to-end Security of the Digital Single Market’s E-commerce and Delivery Service Ecosystem” – ENSURESEC and “Cybersecurity Skills Alliance – A New Vision for Europe” – REWIRE. The aim of the workshop was to find the synergy between the projects and set up the key action points to start the collaboration.
It was agreed to share the results as well as introduce the intermediate developments and achievements between the projects in order to reach the maximum benefits for the partners and also for wider circle of users in Europe.
REWIRE project has strong links with European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), especially in the field of EU Cyber Skills Framework (CSF) development. ENSURESEC collaboration with REWIRE will help to engage ENSURESEC experts’ team in the development of methodology that defines how CSF can be applied to professional training and how to link it to e-commerce sector.
The relationship between projects will lead to the greater impact and sustainability. Consolidated dissemination channels will help to spread the outcomes threw the different networks and to seek more end-users.
For more information about the projects please visit
The SPARTA Project (Grant agreement ID: 830892) is responsible for executing four research programmes that tackle ambitious challenges in cybersecurity, representing major opportunities for enhancing Europe’s strategic autonomy and the Digital Single Market. These programmes account for more than half of the efforts deployed in SPARTA. Although programme leaders have different profiles, all are nevertheless experienced senior experts.
One of the four research programmes, T-Shark (Full Spectrum Situational Awareness), is coordinated by the Lithuanian Cyber Crime Center of Excellence for Training, Research and Education (L3CE).
The cyber threat landscape in today’s world is changing dramatically. Most organisations face rising demands to employ new approaches, operational models and innovative technologies to ensure national and international stability and security.
The key objective of the T-Shark programme is to develop and validate methodological, organisational, and technological solutions that would enhance cybersecurity through the comprehensive organisation of cybersecurity functions, focusing more on threat prediction and full-spectrum cybersecurity awareness. Given the need to validate the T-Shark platform under real-world conditions, all technology solutions were tested using a realistic „Election Interference“ scenario and evaluated by an independent group of experts, which we have called the “Arbitrage Group”.
Despite the great achievements of T-Shark to address complex, sophisticated, full-spectrum threats, a lack of innovative solutions and essential capacities preparing EU for future cybersecurity challenges continue to persist. T-Shark’s experts exerted significant effort into examining the latest developments in EU and national research projects, especially those that could be used as valuable inputs and incorporated into its research results. At the same time, T-Shark facilitated the collaboration among the huge variety of experts and researchers who despite the different fields of interest and research objectives, are able and willing to work together to address the most serious issues.
Today SPARTA succeed to unite the community on the issues surrounding cybersecurity, however, the question how to establish long term, sustainable collaboration links between the ecosystems that contain a huge portfolio of knowledge, practical experience and niche competencies required for the new creations is still open.
As a first step, L3CE initiated discussions with EU-HYBNET network aimed to find new collaboration models that are based on similar goals and objectives.
New arenas for collaboration: EU-HYBNET
SPARTA T-Shark and EU-HYBNET have strong synergies in terms of activities that are related through the technological aspects of hybrid threats and complexity of the relevant phenomena. By combining these two initiatives, especially in areas that are in line with that which was already achieved in the cybersecurity context, we hope to expand the scope of adoption and usability of suitable innovations.
The fields that could be considered for further clustering of EU-HYBNET – SPARTA activities are:
Methodological and technological synchronisation between cybersecurity, prevention, defence operations.
Introduction, testing and validation of the T-Shark Threats Intelligence platform by EU-HYBNET stakeholders
Cyber Professionals competence structure, changes and new demands, new learning methods, new career paths
Extension of SPARTA Cybersecurity Skills Framework adding new professional profiles linked to the new Hybrid Threats phenomena
Innovations exploitation strategies while delivering continuous improvement for end-user’s organisations
Introduction of T-SHARK innovations governance framework and evaluation methodology; involvement of EU-HYBNET stakeholders in Arbitrage Group activities
Alignment of roadmaps and consolidation of prioritised development resources
Introduction of SPARTA Research and Innovation roadmap to the unique EU-HYBNET ecosystem
Integration of new trends and patterns of information to build stronger and aligned awareness
Engagement of SPARTA community in EU-HYBNET activities seeking a deeper understanding of Hybrid Threats phenomena, new trends and integration links with SPARTA research programmes.
As a step towards collaboration, an L3CE initiated workshop between EU-HYBNET and T-SHARK teams aimed to kick-off discussions on how to strengthen synergies between the networks, reduce unnecessary overlapping activities, and maximise achieved results.
In this context, EU-HYBNET has preliminary interest to contribute to the evaluation of innovative solutions based on the “Election Interference” hybrid threats model referred to above.
Moreover, it was agreed that the collaboration model will be tested and piloted, as well as being validated by the T-Shark Arbitrage Group. In this way, T-Shark will benefit from enhanced competence of external experts, and EU-HYBNET is interested in learning from T-SHARK Arbitrage Group validation in order to gain a deeper understanding of innovations that might be considered as a relevant solution to meet the needs of EU-HYBNET stakeholders.
Assuming favourable outcomes over the longer term, the cross-network collaboration tested and piloted by the Arbitrage Group might be transformed into a permanent EU body with independent professional assistance for end-users and make innovations uptake more effective.
In summary, we anticipate that the SPARTA/ T-Shark and EU-HYBNET collaboration will embrace these new approaches, operational models and innovative technologies in ways that will significantly enhance national and international stability and security.
SPARTA and T-SHARK actors are welcomed to get familiar with EU-HYBNET activities and to apply to become a member in the EU-HYBNET Network/ Pan-European Network to Counter Hybrid Threats. The EU-HYBNET has four core themes: I) Future Trends of Hybrid Threats; II) Cyber and Future Technologies; III) Resilient Civilians, Local Level and National Administration; IV) Information and Strategic Communication). Especially the core the “Cyber and Future Technologies” is strongly linked to SPARTA and hence highlights the possibilities for future synergies between SPARTA and EU-HYBNET. More information how to join the network, please see EU-HYBNET webpage.
For more about the SPARTA project follow the link: www.sparta.eu
For more about the EU-HYBNET project follow the link: www.euhybnet.eu
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