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WEBINAR: European Cybersecurity Challenges

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The free webinar on European Cybersecurity Challenges, 30 November, from 10h00 to 12h00 is promoted by the Mission of Switzerland to the EU, SwissCore and the National Research Council of Italy.

The webinar will outline the European Comission aims to improve the EU’s Cybersecurity capacity with a Cybersecurity Competence Center (CCN) and by integrating cybersecurity into the upcoming European knowledge programmes. It will discuss how we can best unlock the potential of innovation in promoting security in the digital sphere and how collaborative infrastructures, partnerships and networks can advance these goals.

It will present the SPARTA cybersecurity competence network and the opportunities it offers for Swiss cybersecurity actors to participate and foster European Colaborations. The webinar will also highlight the strenght and contributions of Swiss academia and Swiss innovation ecosystem.

Find more information abou the event here, as well as the detailed provisional programme....
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Innovation governance based on the diversity of factors that Shaped the Development of the SPARTA T-SHARK Program

22nd Nov 2020
T-SHARK aims to develop and validate methodological, organisational and technological solutions, thereby extending cybersecurity in order to achieve a comprehensive organisation of security functions that focus on threat prediction and full-spectrum cybersecurity awareness, providing high situational awareness and timely warning of threats.  Significantly, T-SHARK and 19 of its partners have focused their primary efforts on the question of delivering full-spectrum cybersecurity awareness with the goal of informing decision and policymakers on broad, long-term issues.

Activities within the Program have been divided into two main streams. 

The first deals with several technology-based developments identified by separate partners or joint teams (defined as Sub-cases). These teams engage in information exchange, develop solutions based on data gathering activities and development of visual analytics capabilities that enable the integration of outputs arising from Sub-cases. 

 The sec...
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Ethical, Societal and Legal Questions in Cybersecurity Research

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Ethical, Societal and Legal Questions in Cybersecurity Research is the theme for the free online workshop promoted by SPARTA WP2, on the 19th November 2020, from 12:00 to 16:30 (CET), at zoom https://zoom.us/j/91005517457 .

The workshop will be divided into three complementary sessions, and a wide range of speakers. See the agenda bellow!



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New arenas for collaboration: EU-HYBNET and T-Shark

28th Oct 2020
SPARTA T-Shark research programme

The SPARTA consortium 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. A majority of 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, organisatio...
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Cyber competence development ecosystem started by SPARTA and further explored by REWIRE

19th Oct 2020
A few years ago, the EC launched 4 pilot projects, namely SPARTA, CONCORDIA, ECHO and CyberSec4Europe in an attempt to take a leading role in developing an EU cybersecurity competence ecosystem. These pilot projects bring together more than 160 partners, including large companies, SMEs, universities and cybersecurity research institutes from 26 EU Member States.

The four pilots have been asked to collaborate and coordinate their activities to address the most critical challenges facing EU: i.e. increasing shortages of cybersecurity professionals, availability of relevant training and certification programs that have been tailored to specific sector requirements, etc.

During the past 18 months of SPARTA implementation, a team of experts extensively analysed the state of the knowledge regarding cyber skills management, skill gaps in industry, skills requirements, adequate provision of sectoral training, cybersecurity skills frameworks, and proposed a way forward with the development...
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Strategic Research and Innovation Roadmap: A Learning Road

19th Oct 2020
The Roadmap Committee has designed instruments and conducted activities that push the evolution of the SPARTA Strategic Research and Innovation (SRI) roadmap to become the main guideline for decision makers to develop strategies to strengthen the EU’s cybersecurity capacity, to close cyber skill gaps and to address emerging challenges appropriately. With SPARTA’s mission-oriented, agile and open approach, the SPARTA SRI will shape the cybersecurity technologies required to establish and maintain a European Strategic Digital Autonomy.

The SPARTA SRI has been successfully presented and discussed with SPARTA associates and friends during the digital Brokerage Event that took place in June. Furthermore, the SPARTA Days #4 collocated with the EuroS&P cybersecurity conference, have been leveraged to present the roadmap challenges and visions to a varied academic audience. The rather specialized audience allowed to present the roadmap achievements with technical details on the technol...
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CAPE & EclipseCon 2020

14th Oct 2020
EclipseCon 2020

SPARTA will be presenting CAPE program - Continuous assessment in polymorphous environments - at the Research Labs exhibit at the virtual EclipseCon 2020, from 19 to 22 October.

The EclipseCon event is a leading conference for developers, architects, and open source business leaders to learn about Eclipse technologies, share best practices, and more!

For more information, visit https://www.eclipsecon.org/2020

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Review the Internet Festival

14th Oct 2020
From 8 to 11 October, Pisa (Italy) was the stage for the Internet Festival, the event that for ten years has been investigating the web with dozens of international experts, panels, workshops, contests, training activities and cultural events. The National Research Council presented a range of 13 events both in presence and streaming with the involvement of the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (Cnr-Iit), the Institute of Science and Information Technology (Cnr-Isti), the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineering and Telecommunications (Cnr-Ieiit), the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (Cnr-Ittig), the .it Registry and the Fondazione Toscana Gabriele Monasterio. The keyword that unites all the events is #reset, a sort of reset of the system in Covid19 times to start from new online and offline bases.

Talking about Network Security

For the third consecutive year, the CNR-Iit dedicated a whole day to the topic of Network Security with the particip...
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CONVERGENCE: Making The European Cybersecurity Competence Network A Reality

13th Oct 2020
The four pilot projects CyberSec4Europe, SPARTA, CONCORDIA and ECHO will gather the European cybersecurity stakeholder community and anyone interested in the future digital security of Europe in one hybrid (online and offline) event: CONVERGENCE!

In a two-day event, we will guide the participants through the progress that is being made in harnessing European expertise and resources in the broader context of the proposed legislation relating to a European Cybersecurity Industrial, Technology and Research Competence Centre and a Network of National Coordination Centres.

The opening session will start on wednesday, 9 December, with welcome addresses from the four pilot coordinators followed by a high-level panel discussion comprising representatives from the European institutions. The two following days will provide attendees with the demonstration of pilots achievements and results to date through videos, presentations, tools, panel discussions, and will also feature a series of foc...
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SPARTA is working towards a better cybersecurity education

30th Sep 2020
Cybersecurity education is an important and pertinent topic as it plays a major role in mitigating the risks caused by a global shortage of cybersecurity experts. SPARTA team worked in several directions to solve the absence of a comprehensive methodology for program design, decrease the need of cybersecurity study programs, and increase the public awareness regarding procedures and tools for the protection of ICT systems.

First, the development of SPARTA Cybersecurity Skills Framework supports the identification of skills necessary for professionals in cybersecurity, and therefore creates the necessary link between education, training and industry. With this common vocabulary, SPARTA was able to analyze existing study programs and visualize the results in a dynamic web application.

In particular, the SPARTA Cybersecurity Higher Education Map contains the list of universities and their study programs, and provides users with the functionality for viewing, filtering using specific ...
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About

Mission

Re-imagining the way cybersecurity research, innovation, and training are performed in Europe across domains and expertise, from foundations to applications, in academia and industry

Impact

SPARTA will create a long-lasting community capable of collaboration to define, develop, share, and evolve solutions that will help practitioners prevent cybercrime and enhance cybersecurity.

Vision

Become a unique innovation force in cybersecurity with transformative impacts on European Union economy, infrastructures, society and democracy.

It's a tough road ahead

With one of the most advanced and multi-cultural research ecosystem in the world, the European Union has the means to take on the cybersecurity challenge. Its scientists have the opportunity to become a unique innovation force in cybersecurity with transformative impacts on our economy, infrastructures, society, and democracy.

Yet many challenges need to be addressed before such a vision can be successful.


How can we design and effectively maintain a European roadmap in cybersecurity research?

How might we cultivate out-of-the-box thinking in research endeavours?

What is the most effective way to maintain excellence in multi-disciplinary pursuits?

These first three items are instrumental to foster a culture of risk-taking – a critical asset for creativity in the face of innovative threats.

These last three items are absolutely key to ensure that the SPARTA network will produce concrete and transformative results. More importantly, they are instrumental in making these results suitable for a wide variety of applications in vertical sectors, creating technological vantage points and economic leverage.


How do we sustain strategic analysis and guidance for research and innovation?

What is the best way to implement flexibility in research actions?

How can we leverage the accumulated strengths of the European industry?

Organizing tomorrow's research activities

Governance activities form the backbone of the network, supporting community activities that range from roadmap design to Request for Challenges, from monthly SPARTA Workshops to bi-yearly SPARTA Days. Research programs are continuously spun from strands of the roadmap, led by experts of their fields, and aim at generating concrete and transformative results.

Develop an ambitious Cybersecurity Research and Innovation Roadmap leveraging Europe’s strengths and opportunities, across multiple disciplines, maturity levels, and geographical locations.

Set up space, time, and means to enable research collaborations, leveraging the strengths of existing structures and organisations around a Joint Competence Center Infrastructure.

Explore innovative work in full- spectrum situational awareness, with the goal of enabling the supervision of complex systems over heterogeneous time scales.

Develop a foundation for secure- by-design intelligent infrastructure built on strong formal approaches, addressing multiple cybersecurity facets.

Investigate new avenues for continuous assessment and new evaluation tools and techniques for handling tomorrow's dynamic and elastic digital systems.

Devise approaches to make systems using AI more reliable and resilient through enhanced explainability and better threat understanding.

Foster the emergence of a thriving and responsible research and innovation model, allowing the development of unique innovation paths, contributing to European strategic autonomy.

Establish unparalleled traction with European, national, and regional ecosystems, relaying concrete requirements, disruptive ideas, and novel results through multi-level and cross-network actions and events.