€12m grant to help fight cyber-attacks on critical services

Bournemouth University (BU) has been awarded part of a €12m grant to reduce the impact of cyber-attacks on critical services including healthcare, energy, transport and communications. 

Academics from BU’s Schools of Computing and Engineering and Psychology will work in partnership with other European universities, health, energy and transport providers on two, three-year projects funded by the EU and managed by the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC).  

They include MoSAIcSOC, a project to give hospitals access to a trusted suite of apps to prevent disruption to medical care caused by cyber-attacks; and SCIFER, which explores how AI can improve the speed and accuracy of cyber-threat detection and provide reliable information in legal cases. 

Of the 65 bids submitted to the Horizon Europe funding call, BU’s Faculty of Media, Science and Technology is a partner in two of only four selected. It will now receive €865,00 of a total €12m grant to provide research, testing and technology development for the projects. 

Professor in Cyber Security, Vasilis Katos, said: “Cyberattacks are increasingly growing in scale, speed, and impact, posing significant risks to Europe’s critical infrastructures. The implications for the healthcare sector are particularly serious, leading in some cases to delays in life-saving treatment. Security Operation Centres are on the front lines of defence but face numerous challenges, and cybersecurity solutions remain fragmented, costly, and often limited to large organisations with extensive in-house expertise. Many small and medium-sized critical operators, such as regional hospitals or local utilities, lack the resources to deploy and maintain advanced monitoring and response.  

“A focus of this research is to resolve these challenges by providing a stable suite of products that can deployed at the touch of a button. This has the potential to dramatically improve the resilience of healthcare services for the benefit of patients across Europe and around the world.” 

Through the SCIFER project, BU will work alongside national agencies providing rail, energy and telecoms services to gather data and to simulate cyber-attacks. It will then test how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used reliably to detect threats, improve response rates and gather information (known as digital forensics) that could be used in a court of law. 

As well as looking at how technology can improve responses to cyber-attacks, both projects will also explore the psychological aspects of detection and response. Professor Katos is working alongside psychology academic Dr Ala Yankouskaya on the research. Dr Yankouskaya said: “We will be researching how advanced AI-powered attack techniques influence the effectiveness, coordination, and cognitive workload of first responder teams during major incidents. The goal is to uncover socio-technical dependencies that are used to exploit people and organisations and propose methods for enhancing preparedness and decision making. Central to this work is a human-centred approach – ensuring that AI-powered tools are designed around the real cognitive and emotional needs of the people using them.” 

Bournemouth University will be conducting the research from its new Cyber Competence Centre, which was funded by a £2.3m grant from the Office for Students and which opens fully this autumn.