European Cyber Security Month: meet HaDEA’s projects enhancing cybersecurity of critical infrastructures

This year, we celebrate the 11th anniversary of the European Cyber Security Month (ECSM), a campaign to raise awareness of cybersecurity and remind us that cybersecurity concerns us all. This year’s ECSM focuses on social engineering – threats that attempt to exploit a human behaviour to gain access to information or services. Social engineering manipulates victims into making mistakes or handing over sensitive information.

This provides an excellent opportunity to showcase HaDEA’s cybersecurity projects. The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme 2014-2020 is among the European Union’s initiatives which enhanced cyber resilience and promoted staff awareness for resisting social engineering tactics to prevent cyberattacks.

HaDEA has been funding 46 CEF-projects to enhance the cybersecurity of critical infrastructures in the energy, health, finance, transport, and water supply sectors.

Successful projects

Be Smarter than a Hacker!

Top Three Cybersecurity Threats

  1. Ransomwareuses extorsion techniques taking control of a target’s assets and demanding payment in exchange for the return of the asset’s availability.
  2. Malware is malicious code that has an adverse impact on the integrity or availability of a system. For instance, viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and spyware.
  3. Social engineering exploits a human error or behaviour to gain access to information or services. It manipulates victims into making mistakes or handing over sensitive information. Examples include phishing, smishing (via SMS) and impersonation (ENISA’s Threat Landscape 2022).

Source: European Commission | European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) (https://shorturl.at/adP35)