PROTECTIVE is designed to improve an organisations ongoing awareness of the risk posed to its business by cyber security attacks. PROTECTIVE makes two key contributions to achieve this enhanced situational awareness. Firstly it increases the computer security incident response team’s (CSIRT) threat awareness through improved security monitoring and increased sharing of threat intelligence between organisations within a community. Secondly it ranks critical alerts based on the potential damage the attack can inflict on the threatened assets and hence to the organisations business. High impact alerts that target important hosts will have a higher priority than other alerts. Through the combination of these two measures organisations are better prepared to handle incoming attacks, malware outbreaks and other security problems and to guide the development of the prevention and remediation processes. The PROTECTIVE system is designed to provide solutions for public domain CSIRTs and SME’s who both have needs outside the mainstream of cyber security solution provision. Public CSIRTs needs arise in part because commercial tools do not address their unique requirements. This has created a shortfall, clearly articulated by ENISA, of tools with the required analytical and visualisation capabilities to enable public CSIRTs provide optimised services to their constituency. SME’s also are vulnerable to cybercrime as they have limited resources to protect themselves and often a limited understanding of what needs to be done. Two pilots will be conducted to evaluate and validate the PROTECTIVE outcomes with CSIRTs from 3 National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) and with SMEs via a managed security service provider (MSSP). The PROTECTIVE consortium is constituted of 3 NRENs, 3 academic and four commercial partners from 8 countries so as to maximise the technical and commercial impact of the outputs and the dissemination and uptake of the results.

With the prevailing risk of cybersecurity breaches, improving the cyber security posture and detection algorithms is of utmost importance. Malware is now recognized as the severe threat for commercial and critical IT systems (e.g. financial sector) , but also for citizens (e.g. mobile malware). Still, currently malware is well understood and can be tackled reasonably well. What is becoming more problematic, is the stegomalware and the use of the information hiding techniques by cyber criminals. And here comes SIMARGL: our goal is to focus on this emerging future threat and to significantly improve malware and stegomalware detection. Currently, cyber criminals use quite simple information hiding techniques, but they learn and improve quickly. Our consortium believes that we cannot stay many steps behind, but provide relevant techniques to be prepared for the future attacks and stegomalwre. SIMARGL consortium does not start from scratch (current solutions are described in the proposal) and it features relevant partners, expertise and links to fulfil the project goals.

DANUBIUS-PP is a three-year project to raise DANUBIUS-RI (International Centre for Advanced Studies on River-Sea Systems) to the legal, financial and technical maturity required for successful implementation and development. DANUBIUS-RI is a pan-European distributed research infrastructure (RI) building on existing expertise to support interdisciplinary research on river-sea (RS) systems, spanning the environmental, social and economic sciences. It will provide access to a range of RS systems, facilities and expertise, a ‘one-stop shop’ for knowledge exchange, access to harmonised data, and a platform for interdisciplinary research, education and training. DANUBIUS-PP will bring together key stakeholders at different levels, and strengthen the consortium through a process of wide engagement. Individual work packages will refine, inter alia, the scientific and innovation agenda, the legal framework, governance and management, and policies for access and data management. The financial requirements of the RI will be refined to assist funding agencies as they consider future spending priorities. Key deliverables of DANUBIUS-PP include development of the legal and financial agreements for the components of the RI (including Hub, Nodes and Supersites), their governance, and internal organisation which will be confirmed via a Memorandum of Understanding. This preparatory phase project will develop the structures and processes to ensure that the RI strengthens scientific performance by providing a sustainable basis for future operation, delivering key services to the different user communities.