Greek Security Operations Centre for Small and Medium Enterprises

ongoing

The need to strengthen SMEs' cybersecurity is crucial, as they are the backbone of the economy and social fabric of the EU. Numerous cybersecurity reports show that the attacks on SMEs have risen rapidly especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic as it forced SMEs to embrace remote working and a shift towards new digital technologies, albeit without having adequate cybersecurity defenses in place. GR-SME-SOC aims to create a sectoral SOC supporting the Greek SME community. It will operate independently, under the aegis of the Greek National Cyber Security Authority (NCSA). The consortium will contribute a rich set of easy-to-deploy, ready-to-use, and high-maturity tools for high performance real-time monitoring, threat detection, prediction and recommendations, as well as reporting, alerting and coordinated response capabilities. It will provide a rich set of endpoint detectors, such as network firewalls and anti-malware systems at the SMEs’ systems and networks, allowing continuous monitoring, information gathering and malicious event capturing. It will also develop and provide playbooks for proactive and reactive automated defensive courses of action. The endpoint information will be aggregated in the SOC, enriched with public CTI data, and used for AI-enhanced data analysis. State-of-the-art ML-based data fusion, correlation and analysis solutions will provide UEBA capabilities to the SMEs by enabling attack categorization, prioritization, prediction and recommendation. GR-SME-SOC will provide risk assessments as well as communication and reporting mechanisms for SME information exchange, entities across different sectors, and the authorities. Finally, it will be tested and evaluated in real world scenarios and at scale, providing its services to 120 SMEs. This proposal is supported by the Ministry of Digital Governance of Greece and the National Cybersecurity Authority(Letter) and is fully in line with the Greek Cyber Security Strategy.