The EU research project MITIGATE has been completed and the ambitious goal of designing, developing and implementing a risk assessment and management system for the maritime transport chain in 30 months has been accomplished, according to data provided by the latest edition of Be Cyber Aware at Sea campaign.
The acronym ‘MITIGATE’ stands for Multidimensional, integrated, risk assessment framework and dynamic, collaborative Risk Management tools for critical information infrastructures and is a collaborative research project co-funded by the European Commission, from 1 September 2015 to 28 February 2018, under its biggest Research and Innovation program Horizon 2020.
Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020) – in addition to the private investment that this money will attract. It promises more breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking great ideas from the lab to the market.
At the beginning of the development, many companies in the maritime transport industry stressed their need for support in assessing how well their IT assets (hardware and software components) are protected against attacks and how external and internal cyber attacks can be prevented. The results of a survey among almost 200 maritime stakeholders showed that nearly two thirds of the companies responding did not carry out a risk assessment.
They also expect a solution like MITIGATE to comply with national and international standards and regulations. The result of the project work is a software environment that can be used cloudbased, but also locally in the company. It enables companies to map IT assets that support their business processes through data processing and data exchange. These assets are connected along an information chain and can be tested for known weak points and attack potentials.
The information chain is connected virtually to the business partners without the assets used being disclosed to each other. Information about new vulnerabilities and threats is not only collected automatically from databases, but also from social networks and other Internet sources specializing in IT security. Practical tests and evaluation of the software solution have involved more than 680 representatives of the maritime transport chain at more than 70 events. Test runs with real data and live demonstrations were used to adapt the system to the needs of users.
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