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Last week, GÉANT Security Days, a 3-day event bringing together practitioners from European academic community, took place in Prague. Václav Bartoš, a member of the SOCCER team from CESNET, was there to introduce the project to the event participants and to initiate discussions about potential future collaboration with GÉANT and NRENs.
GÉANT is the umbrella organization connecting European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). It facilitates collaboration in many areas. In the last few years, there is a quickly growing interest in fostering collaboration in the cybersecurity field as well. The GÉANT Security Days event is a part of this initiative. This year’s edition was the first one of a planned series of such meetings. It brought together almost 150 cybersecurity practitioners from European academic community – mostly from GÉANT, NRENs and universities. The event was full of interesting presentations, as well as workshops and side-meetings focused on specific topics.
The SOCCER representative was there to present a lightning talk about the project and to attend several relevant workshops. His presence at the event was focused on two goals. The first one was to raise awareness of the project and its planned outcomes, primarily the SOC4Academia toolbox, which might be useful to many of the universities and other academic institutions. Indeed, several event participants already expressed interest in the toolbox.
Second, one of the goals of the SOCCER project is to establish an information and CTI sharing ecosystem across the academic sector, so the NREN community is a natural partner to collaborate with. Therefore, we used the event to initiate discussions about such collaboration and to establish contacts with organizations interested in sharing information about cyber threats.
It turned out GÉANT itself has various plans for cybersecurity collaboration among NRENs. For example a plan for R&E Security Intelligence Hub, which aims to bring together experts from several NRENs to collect and analyze threat intelligence collaboratively and to share it into the community. There is also an intention to share data about DDoS and other attacks among some NRENs. These plans are similar to those of the SOCCER project, just on a different level (SOCCER focuses primarily on sharing among universities).
The SOCCER representative took part in all relevant discussions and we believe this will be just a beginning of fruitful collaboration between SOCCER and GÉANT in the task of building a broad collaboration and information sharing community in the academic sector.