Call: Addressing Advanced Cyber Security Threats and Threat Actors

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models

Over the past decade, we have seen that cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, stealthy, targeted and multi-faceted which may leverage zero-day exploits and highly creative interdisciplinary attack methods.

Detecting and responding to such attacks by a highly motivated, skilled and well-funded attacker has, however, been proven highly challenging.

As our society is becoming increasingly dependent on (critical) cyber infrastructure, new technologies are needed to increase our detection and response capabilities.

This call includes two types of action: 

• Innovation action (IA):

The focus of the proposals should be on the development of novel approaches for providing organisations the appropriate situational awareness in relation to cyber security threats allowing them to detect and quickly and effectively respond to sophisticated cyber-attacks.
 

• Research and Innovation action (RIA) with different aims and funding details:

Proposals should develop innovative simulation environments and training materials in order to adequately prepare those tasked with defending high-risk organisations to counter advanced cyber-attacks.

At least three legal entities. Each of the three must be established in a different EU Member State or Horizon 2020 associated country. All three legal entities must be independent of each other. 

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between 2 and 5 million €  would allow these areas to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

EU funding rate: 70% (except for non-profit legal entities, where a rate of 100% applies) - for IA

EU funding rate: 100% - for RIA

Electronic submission here.

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.