Concordia left the door open for you

On the 16th and 17th of this October, in the European cybersecurity awareness month and the Luxembourgish cybersecurity events week, the CONCORDIA OPEN DOOR event made its debut in the capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. One hundred participants from both industry and academia, including also representatives of some national ministries, attended talks from CONCORDIA experts on several facets of cybersecurity.

European Commission came up with an idea: integrating all the cybersecurity competencies to create a network that every stakeholder can benefit from. Researchers, industrials, investors, entrepreneurs, developers, lawyers, policymakers, … everybody is a player in the Cybersecurity landscape that cannot and does not consider only the IT communities. This is the objective of CONCORDIA, but it is not an easy one. Europe is so fragmented that just listing all the entities with cybersecurity competencies is already a quite-impossible task. Even though seeking new partners and collaboration all around Europe is vital to create the cybersecurity competences network, CONCORDIA has to be present and presented as the reference entry point to the several cybersecurity-related activities in Europe. That’s how we decided to open the door of CONCORDIA, to show to the public what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why joining is fundamental for the personal, private, national, and European growth in this complex and dynamic field.

On the 16th and 17th of this October, the CONCORDIA OPEN DOOR event made its debut. It started with prof. Gabi Dreo Rodosek, the coordinator of CONCORDIA, who presented the project and all the services that were going to be sponsored during the day. People were happily surprised when the first day ended, and nobody showed a line of code. Mr Franco from the University of Zurich explained us the role of economics in cybersecurity, while Dr.Van Der Wees from Arthur’s Legal made a brilliant overview of the relationship between regulation and cybersecurity, including GDPR and cybersecurity act, proving the audience to think how to connect, collaborate, and create together.

Right after lunch, we had the opportunity to discuss with regulators, from both demand- and supply- side, in an exciting panel, entitled “What can the community offer to the future European Cybersecurity Competence Center?”. The outcome was clear: stakeholders in the EU need to build collaborative competences jointly, but cybersecurity is still felt like a zero return on investment. Citizens must be sensitised on the topic, but also organisations must agree that Cybersecurity is not a problem, but a solution.

We ended the day by explaining some of our services: CONCORDIA is an ecosystem that provides support to every European stakeholder with cyber-ranges, training courses, tools portfolio, cybersecurity professional courses, and startup growth and support services.

On the other hand, the second day was more research and development, more technical. Even partly aggregating the European competencies in less than one year, CONCORDIA demonstrated it can already produce innovation. This innovation is due to a collaborative model instantiated between industries and academia.

We started the morning with flash talks from Caixa bank, Infineon, and Airbus. They showed the challenges they are facing and how being part of CONCORDIA is helping them to find solutions.

Later, we exposed more than 30 research posters covering the full spectrum of cybersecurity: from user privacy to software-, network-, and hardware-centric cybersecurity.

Then, it was the time of our vertical pilots: Dr Caselli from Siemens presented the threat intelligence for Europe. Sharing information is the only way to grow together as Europeans, and it is European the technologies used for this system: MISP, the sharing platform designed and developed in Luxembourg. Dr Hesselman presented the complementary system that is the DDoS Clearing House for Europe. It extends DDoS protection services that critical service providers use through continuous and automatic sharing of fingerprints.

We concluded the event with prof Ardagna, from the University of Milano. He presented a methodology his team is using to catalogue the cybersecurity threats and predict their future evolutions in Europe and beyond.

Have you missed it? No worries, Concordia left the door open!
We uploaded most of the presentations and posters online (https://opendoor.concordia-h2020.eu/program.html). Furthermore, follow us on social media so that you’ll be the first to know the next CONCORDIA event!

(by Antonio Ken IANNILLO, University of Luxembourg)