The European Commission contribution to cybersecurity through the ECHO project

This paper introduces the work carried out within project ECHO (European network of Cybersecurity centres and competence Hub for innovation and Operations), one of the four pilot projects financed under the H2020 framework aiming to connect and share knowledge across multiple domains, while building a common cybersecurity strategy for Europe, inside the framework of the European Cybersecurity Competence Center located in Bucharest. The question is: what can EU countries do to strengthen the Union’s cyber defence and ensure a secure cybersecurity ecosystem that would protect citizens, economy and infrastructures from cyber-attacks? The first step is to assure that EU citizens are aware of these risks and are ready to fight them. To this purpose, ECHO project develops: (1) a marketplace of multi-sector services coming from multiple cyber ranges, the E-FCR (ECHO Federated Cyber Range), to be applied in several areas, with particular attention to the Healthcare sector, (2) a distributed platform, the E-EWS (ECHO Early Warning System), for information sharing across organizational boundaries that provides companies with a common operational cyber threat situation picture tailored for different types of users (from technical cyber experts to management executives). This paper gives an overview of the architecture of these solutions, highlighting why they could become paramount for a standardised cybersecurity training at European and international levels.