The new EU-funded PUZZLE project is here for SMEs and citizens when their cyber prevention efforts fail

DIGITAL SME partners with some of the strongest European players in cybersecurity in the new EU-funded PUZZLE project. Selected as one of the most innovative new approaches in cybersecurity by the European Commission, PUZZLE aims to strengthen cyber-safety by focusing on post-threat mitigation, filling an important security gap for many SMEs and citizens.

DIGITAL SME will form the project’s link to the target-user group, raising awareness about post-incident management and making sure the solutions are apt for SME-use.

Brussels, 8 September 2020 (DIGITAL SME). Cybersecurity is the base-layer of Europe’s shift towards a digital economy of the future. Accelerated by the current pandemic which caused millions of offices across the continent to switch to teleworking, this development highlights the need for businesses, citizens, and public administrations to increase their cybersecurity.

While malicious attacks on the digital infrastructures and data of businesses and public administrations become more and more sophisticated, SMEs cannot keep up. Having to spend their limited resources on product development, marketing, and similar expenses, cybersecurity and prevention are often an afterthought. Basic “cyber hygiene” and the prevention of cyberattacks are crucial first measures to increase resilience. For this reason, most cybersecurity efforts and projects are geared towards pre-incident cybersecurity. PUZZLE, however, will take a different approach and focus on post-incident mitigation.

The idea of this new project, funded through the Horizon 2020 framework, is to minimise (or even eliminate, where possible) the impact of cyber-attacks. It will do so by combining novel situation awareness techniques, advanced risk analysis, and valuable incident sharing among clusters of digital companies.

PUZZLE will provide a dynamic, collaborative warning and response system helping security officers and operators (e.g. incident response professionals) to recognise, identify, dynamically analyse, forecast, and respond to threats. Utilising both structured data (e.g. logs and network traffic) and unstructured data (e.g. data coming from social networks or the dark web) SMEs will be better able to handle daily cyber incidents.

DIGITAL SME will form the link between the technical developments and the end-user group, which will mainly consist of ICT SMEs.

We will support SME-onboarding and ensure that the final solution benefits SME users, for instance by contributing to an Innovation Contest where SMEs will be granted a €10,000 Innovation Coupon to adopt and test the PUZZLE solution.

DIGITAL SME will also contribute to SME awareness-raising, cybersecurity-training development (using cyber ranges) and the project’s innovation management.

The PUZZLE consortium contains some of the strongest European players in cybersecurity, such as Ubitech, FORTH, Montimage and Intrasoft. We are looking forward to filling the critical gap of post-incident impact-mitigation in SMEs. Only through a comprehensive set of cybersecurity measures will Europe’s economy be able to prevail in the digital age, and the PUZZLE project is an important step in that direction.

Stay tuned for more info about PUZZLE in the coming weeks!