Giorgi, G., Cristofori, D., Zanasi, A. (2021). The European Commission contribution to cybersecurity through the ECHO project
Our paper “The European Commission contribution to cybersecurity through the ECHO project” has been published in IEEE Xplore, after being presented at the 2021 14th CMI International Conference – Critical ICT Infrastructures and Platforms (CMI).
This paper introduces the work carried out within the project ECHO (European network of Cybersecurity centres and competence Hub for innovation and Operations), one of the four pilot projects financed under the H2020 framework aiming to connect and share knowledge across multiple domains, while building a common cybersecurity strategy for Europe, inside the framework of the European Cybersecurity Competence Center located in Bucharest.
The question we tried to answer to is: what can EU countries do to strengthen the Union’s cyber defence and ensure a secure cybersecurity ecosystem that would protect citizens, economy and infrastructures from cyber-attacks? We believe that the first step is to assure that EU citizens are aware of these risks and are ready to fight them. To this purpose, ECHO project develops:
- a marketplace of multi-sector services coming from multiple cyber ranges, the E-FCR (ECHO Federated Cyber Range), to be applied in several areas (e.g. Healthcare),
- a distributed platform, the E-EWS (ECHO Early Warning System), for information sharing across organizational boundaries that provides companies with a common operational cyber threat situation picture tailored for different types of users (from technical cyber experts to management executives).
This paper gives an overview of the architecture of the abovementioned solutions, highlighting why they could become paramount for a standardised cybersecurity training at European and international levels.