Consortium Targets Automatic Prevention of Cyber Attacks

With the support of the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, the consortium Automated Security Operations (ASOP) has been launched in September 2020. The consortium formation and implementation programme is building on an exploratory phase enabled by the financial backing of the Province of South Holland, the municipality of The Hague and the Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Region (MRDH). Over the next 3 years, the consortium will work within a public-private partnership between Dutch cybersecurity companies, public organisations and TNO to develop an automated security platform that will enable organisations to automatically and more quickly detect and respond to cyberattacks.

The 'Cybersecuritybeeld Nederland 2020' concludes that digital threats regarding the national security are permanent. Most organisations are not able to keep up with the developments of these digital threats. The 'Knowledge- and innovation agenda (KIA) Security' shows that organisations within this entire chain acknowledge that automating the cybersecurity activities is an important solution to create resilience with the limited available capacity. The Netherlands is facing the quick digitalisation of processes and services, which placed the Netherlands in a strong economic position.

To keep using these economic and societal chances, it is necessary to have faith and feel safe within the digital world. Recent cyberattacks on the municipality of Lochem and the university of Maastricht show what the consequences are for these organisations, their employees and their citizens. Cybersecurity has become a basic pre-condition for a prosperous and safe society in the 21^st century. Security Operation Centers (SOC) are crucial when detecting attacks and are core players in most cybersecurity strategies. Automatically carrying out cyberattacks are increasing and therefore, counter those attacks cannot only be done through human actions anymore. 

Developing the SOC of the future

Consortium ASOP therefore wants to create a 'game changing' integral modular platform for security operations, in other words, developing the SOC of the future. This platform needs to have a high degree of interoperability between security products, which need to be scalable. This needs to create the possibility to the high degree of automatic security operations, which should contribute to the improvement of proactively and reactively counter cyberattacks throughout the whole chain, from end-users to developers.

Connecting other private parties

Different companies that offer cyber security solutions such as, KPN, NetDialog, VMWare, Cisco and Infradata expressed their interest for this automatic security platform. Cyberveilig Nederland (CVNL) and the Hague Security Delta (HSD) are involved in this consortium to include more parties that want to contribute to the development of the platform. Furthermore, providers of cyber security products will, in collaboration with HSD, be involved so they can adaptively innovate their products and can anticipate on the arrival of an automated security platform.

The security of the critical infrastructure of the province of South-Holland and the continuity of businesses processes of the municipality of the Hague are the concrete scenario’s the platform will focus on. In the future, a connection will be made with the new platform for cybersecurity knowledge and innovation led by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. 

Read the press release (in Dutch) 

More information about the programme or TNO