The SOCCER project has begun!

SOCCER means Security Operation Center in Central Europe Region 

The SOCCER project is co-funded by the EU Programme Digital Europe to improve cybersecurity capacities in European academia. The three-year project is coordinated by AGH University based in Poland and connects nine partners from five countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The project focuses on developing Security Operations Centres (SOC) capabilities to provide safer cyberspace for university students and employees. 

The European Commission's goal, which also the SOCCER project reflected, is to establish high-end security monitoring centers throughout the Union. The centers' position and importance will be strengthened by rapidly developing technologies, especially in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The European Commission wants individual security monitoring centers - Security Operations Centers (SOCs) - to be established, supported, and linked at regional, national, and EU levels.  

The SOCCER project will increase the capacity to monitor and detect cyber threats, build knowledge, and share best practices in the academic sector - especially in universities and research and technology organizations that are vulnerable to significant attacks, data leaks, or attempts to take over specific solutions emerging from universities. 

SOCCER Team  

AGH is leading the implementation of the EU-funded SOCCER project. The prestigious €10 million project is co-financed under the first grant program for the construction of a network of Security Operations Centers (SOC) in the European Union. The development of individual centers will lead to more effective monitoring, detection, and response to cyber attacks, helping to protect students', employees’, and researchers' data, intellectual property rights, and key technologies. 

Participating in the international SOCCER consortium from five EU countries, in addition to AGH, which is the leader of the project, are:  

• Jagiellonian University,  
• Agricultural University of Krakow,  
• Tomas Bata University,  
• Masaryk University,  
• and CESNET - all three from the Czech Republic,  
• Pavol Jozef Šafárik University from Slovakia,  
• Mykolo Romerio Universitetas from Lithuania,  
• Tartu University from Estonia.  

The development of individual security monitoring centers at these universities will lead to more effective monitoring, detection, and response to cyber attacks, thereby protecting the personal data of students, employees and researchers, intellectual property rights, and key technologies. The consortium's action responds to the specific challenge of the increase in the number and complexity of cyber attacks and cyber operations targeting the academic sector, as well as the security challenges of the Central and Eastern European region being on the front line of hybrid threats. 

- Together with the other partners in the consortium, and in cooperation with business, we will initiate the creation of an inter-university and international database of cyber incidents in the academic sector, which will allow us to raise awareness and improve our ability to respond to threats to our networks - stresses Izabela Albrycht, Director of the AGH Cybersecurity Center and manager of the SOCCER project. - The goal is also to increase the university's resilience to the growing number of cyber attacks targeting the academic sector. This also fits in with efforts to build the cyber-security of NATO's eastern flank countries and the efforts of the European Union, which is posting active measures in the area of cyber defense of key infrastructure facilities, protection of personal and industrial data, as well as intellectual property and critical technologies - Izabela Albrycht adds. 

SOCCER - together for cyber secure academia sector! 

The SOCCER project will strengthen the cybersecurity capabilities and resilience of the European academia by supporting the development of skills, readiness, and capacities of the Security Operations Centres in the academic sector. The project partners will join forces to provide better monitoring, detection, and response to cyber-attacks and threats, including knowledge and cyber threat intelligence sharing through vulnerability databases. The partners will leverage state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, including machine learning techniques and computing power, to innovate and improve the detection of malicious cyber activities. Another important goal is the popularisation of knowledge about Security Operations Centres and their development and building of a critical mass of awareness and cybersecurity skills across academia so that every academic and research community member can contribute to a safer cyberspace. 

SOCCER is launched! 

The project inauguration meeting is an element of ongoing coordination and professional supervision of the project and support for all project partners. The topics discussed during the meeting will have a direct impact on the quality of the tasks performed, both in terms of administration and science, their timeliness, and reducing the occurrence of risks related to the process of implementing individual WPs, as well as increasing the involvement of project partners.  

The next meetings are scheduled in the next two months, as per the schedule, broken down into meetings: General Assemble, Executive Board, and Tech Lead, where a detailed project plan and next steps will be discussed.