CS-AWARE-NEXT

Objectives

Improved organisational policy support for dynamic cybersecurity management

Provide a cybersecurity management policy framework for organizations to better address the dynamic and constantly changing cybersecurity landscape. This includes a tighter integration between classical risk management and incident management tasks, in order to e.g. be able to more dynamically manage disaster recovery and business continuity after an incident. Collaboration within organizations (between different departments) and with other actors in the multi-level European cybersecurity framework, starting from actors in the local/regional supply chain to actors and authorities on the national/European level, is an important aspect to be addressed by a modern organizational cybersecurity management policy framework.

Better cybersecurity cooperation and collaboration on the local and regional level

Provide a socio-technical framework for local/regional cooperation/collaboration on cybersecurity to better address local supply chain dependencies. The local/regional level is currently not addressed in a strategic way in the multi-level cybersecurity framework established by the 2013/2020 European cybersecurity strategy and the NIS/NIS2 directive. This objective aims to address this gap and provide adequate support for cooperation and collaboration on this level (both methodological and tool support), and to improve the link between the local/regional level and the multi-level cybersecurity framework outlined by European legislation.

Improved data quality assessment and AI-based data correlation for utilising threat intelligence and social media in dynamic incident and risk management

Provide a real-time data collection and AI framework that is able to collect information from a variety of sources (log files, threat intelligence, social media, …) and correlate organizational and local/regional information (assets, dependencies, behaviour, …) with contextual cybersecurity information coming from threat intelligence or social media discussions. The goal of the framework is to be able to (a) better predict systemic vulnerabilities and risks by mapping the organizational state with the cybersecurity landscape in a dynamic way, and (b) derive mitigation and disaster recovery/business continuity/self-healing strategies, building the knowledge base for the dynamic cybersecurity and incident management covered in other project objectives (policy framework, local/regional and multi-level collaboration, dynamic business continuity and self-healing as well as cybersecurity information sharing).

Dynamic disaster recovery, business continuity and system self-healing on the organisational and local/regional level

Provide a framework for dynamic (real-time) creation and continuous reassessment of disaster recovery/business continuity options relevant to specific organizational or local/regional dependency set-ups to be able to deal with cascading effects. The framework will be designed to take into account systemic organizational and local/regional set-ups as well as general mitigation and recovery/ business continuity strategies shared via e.g. threat intelligence to predict and provide tailored recovery/ business continuity and self-healing strategies. The goal of this framework is the closer integration of disaster recovery/ business continuity, which is traditionally a risk management task, with the day-to-day (real-time) incident management. Therefore, the framework will provide integrations with cybersecurity incident management tools and advanced system self-healing tools for technical assistance and automated implementation of business continuity in case of an incident.

Improved integration of threat intelligence and information sharing in organisational cybersecurity management

The generation and sharing of threat intelligence based on real-world evidence is one of the core pillars of the multi-level collaborative European cybersecurity framework. Collaboration and information sharing is already operational to some extend on the European and national levels (e.g. between competent authorities, CSIRTs), but when it comes to utilization of threat intelligence by individual organizations and local/regional networks in their day-to-day cybersecurity incident and risk management, there is currently little awareness and supporting procedures/tools available to streamline the process. Besides technical obstacles to improve the automation of the process, there are organizational/political as well as social/psychological issues involved that prevent organizations from sharing information about cybersecurity beyond legal obligations.

Define KPI based benchmarking and profiling to dynamically assess the security state in the multi-level cybersecurity environment

Provide KPI based benchmarking and profiling to help organizations assess their (cascading) cybersecurity risk and incident management performance against other actors in the collaborative multi-level European cybersecurity environment (e.g. other organizations in the local/regional network, other organizations in the same NIS sector, other organizations in the national/European context). In line with the framework defined by the 2013/2020 European cybersecurity strategy and subsequent legislation (e.g. NIS/NIS2), the aim is to continuously monitor and assess the cybersecurity state of organizations according to performance indicators related to the European cybersecurity framework (e.g. how much information shared, how many resources dedicated to collaboration in a certain time frame, impact on the effectiveness of cybersecurity management, …). This objective includes the definition of appropriate KPIs in the context of the main project objectives, and a reference implementation to automatically collect and visualize the relevant statistical information and to evaluate the KPIs in the context of the CS-AWARE platform. The goal of the KPI based benchmarking is to allow organizations to better assess their cybersecurity status against other relevant actors, and at the same time provide incentives to improve their behaviour in areas they are lacking behind, in order to more actively participate in the European collaborative cybersecurity efforts.

Provide a reference implementation and deployment in the context of the CS-AWARE cybersecurity awareness and collaboration platform

While frameworks and methodologies defined through the project objectives are designed to be generic and can in general be adapted to any advanced cybersecurity solutions like SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems, a reference implementation of all frameworks and methodologies (policy framework, local/regional collaboration, AI framework, disaster recovery/business continuity framework, KPI based benchmarking and profiling framework, system self-healing and cybersecurity information sharing) will be provided in the context of the CS-AWARE platform developed during the CS-AWARE H2020 project, allowing to integrate the novel aspects developed in this project by extending existing components (awareness and visualization, data collection and AI, system self-healing, cybersecurity information sharing), and adding/integrating new components to the CS-AWARE framework (cybersecurity policy management, local/regional collaboration, business continuity, KPI based benchmarking and profiling).

Follow an agile, design-science based approach to project implementation and validation, with end-user involvement in all project phases

The applicability and relevance of the objectives addressed by this project in the context real-world scenarios needs to be ensured through agile, iterative and collaborative design, implementation and validation. This involves the inclusion of the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders (e.g. academic, industry, authorities, end- user) in all project phases (e.g. requirements analysis, design, implementation, validation). For this purpose, realistic scenarios will be developed together with the stakeholders to serve as basis for design and validation. The project consortium includes relevant public and NIS sector partners in two local/regional case studies in Greece and Italy (including NIS critical sector organisations from health care and water supply/distribution, and major Industry representatives), as well as a relevant CERT/CSIRT partner to ensure the inclusion of actors from the multi-level European cybersecurity environment.

Find out more

Learn more about the project’s results in our deliverables.

Publications

Recent posts

You can follow the progress of the project by reading our blog posts.

Data-driven cybersecurity

By Cinzia Cappiello on April 17, 2023

Data-driven cybersecurity The availability of a large amount of data facilitates the spreading of a data-driven culture in which data are used and analyzed to support decision-making. This is also true for the cybersecurity environment in which the increasing number of threats appearing over time and related public data caused a “paradigm shift in understanding and defending against the evolving cyber attacks, from primarily reactive detection toward proactive prediction”. Conventional data analysis approaches cannot address the complexity of the new threats and the velocity with which they are generated and spread throughout the Internet: more flexible and efficient mechanisms are needed.

Cyberattack in Thessaloniki

By Stefanos Kytanis on March 28, 2023

Cyberattack in Thessaloniki Five years ago the security of the digital infrastructures of the organisations was not even an object of discussion. Most though of security as a store room with a lock on the outside, a back-up external drive, that usually remained connected on the server, and an antivirus that in most of the cases was a free one. It comes without saying that file sharing policies, back-up check in portable devices, active directory, firewall, certified connection of the users in the internet, GDPR, website access restrictions and in everything that we today consider digital security.

Users are not stupid

By John Forrester on March 28, 2023

Users are not stupid This article from Julie Haney of NIST deals with some of the misconceptions and pitfalls that cyber security professionals fall victim to. These pitfalls reflect a tendency in the cyber security community “to focus and depend on technology to solve today’s security problems while at the same time failing to appreciate the human element: the individual and social factors affecting security adoption.” To appreciate the importance of the human element in cyber security, Haney suggests it would be best to understand the concepts of usability and usable cyber security.

Why old school thinking?

By John Forrester on March 28, 2023

Why old school thinking? For many years, a report from Govloop in the US writes, government agencies have applied a “hodgepodge of cyber-security strategies” to counter both internal and external risks. Many relied on firewalls to manage external activity and potential threats. In the end, the Govloop authors conclude that Legacy firewalls tend to be more concerned with activity attempting to penetrate their perimeter defenses and do not monitor internal activities within the local network.

What's

The mission

Objectives

Improved organisational policy support for dynamic cybersecurity management

Better cybersecurity cooperation and collaboration on the local and regional level

Improved data quality assessment and AI-based data correlation for utilising threat intelligence and social media in dynamic incident and risk management

Dynamic disaster recovery, business continuity and system self-healing on the organisational and local/regional level

Improved integration of threat intelligence and information sharing in organisational cybersecurity management

Define KPI based benchmarking and profiling to dynamically assess the security state in the multi-level cybersecurity environment

Provide a reference implementation and deployment in the context of the CS-AWARE cybersecurity awareness and collaboration platform