Synapse

An Integrated Cyber Security Risk & Resilience Management Platform, With Holistic Situational Awareness, Incident Response & Preparedness Capabilities

Project Overview:

SYNAPSE is a European project that brings together 14 entities from different countries (Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany, Cyprus, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland) to provide an integrated cybersecurity risk management and resilience platform. This platform, attractive for many critical infrastructures, must integrate all those mechanisms that allow addressing the three essential pillars of SYNAPSE: Situational awareness (Pillar-I), incident response (Pillar-II) and preparedness (Pillar-III). To achieve this, multiple technologies, techniques, tools and methodologies are widely considered to drive and foster these 3 pillars, and in some way promote dynamic risk management, proactive detection, monitoring and tracking of attacks, and response against potential threats, offering guarantees of business continuity at all times.

In addition, this project, with a very ambitious but useful perspective for society, includes the use of artificial intelligence as a “central” element capable of dynamising detection processes and leading automatic actions to protect the underlying systems. As proof of this, SYNAPSE also offers three key pilots to demonstrate this capacity for proactive detection, response and constant preparation of experts in cybersecurity and incident management. The three pilots are:

Pilot 1 – Energy storage & distribution
Pilot 2 – Supply Chain of Public Healthcare System
Pilot 3 – Cybersecurity Insurance Horizontal Pilot

As part of the consortium, NICS Lab leads one of the main pillars of the project. More specifically, the research team is responsible for the leadership of the work package related to “AI-enhanced Situational Awareness”, addressing interesting hot-topics such as the extraction and analysis of actionable and relevant cyber threat intelligence, early warning against potential attacks and threat hunting. In addition, NICS Lab leads other relevant actions such as regulatory requirements and the state-of-the-art analysis of enablers and technologies, as well as the validation of pilots, and all activities related to communication and dissemination.

This project has received funding from Horizon Europe, under Grant Agreement No 101120853.