Technical progress means that reality now exceeds our imagination.
We live in an increasingly digitalized world, populated by devices and smart objects that we can control from any place at any time.We can start our washing machine with an app, regulate our home heating from the office, shop at the click of a button: we can do all this simply from our smartphone or computer. Technology improves our lives. But what would happen if someone was to use technology against us?
"Several years ago, a known hotel had to pay a major ransom to a team of criminals who had hacked their IT systems, making it impossible for new customers to access their rooms, among other things. For a few hours, the hotel guests were hostages of the malware hitting the hotel!"
This is not a scene from the Mr. Robot TV series: it really happened. Andrea Guarino, Cyber Security Acea, tells us about this curious anecdote.
"We live in the times of the Internet of Things. Our children are digital natives. This means that the more we use technology, the more we are vulnerable to cyber attacks." Andrea goes on.
Also Acea consider cyber security a priority in order to protect its infrastructures from potential cyber attacks. For this reasons Andrea regularly attends international conferences on information security and has been an advisor in a number of European projects. His experience in this field, and the work carried out with his team did not go unnoticed, in fact it reached beyond our country's borders.
It all started in 2013, when Acea was a partner of the EU Panoptesec project, developing response scenarios and protocols for potential cyber attacks to the electricity infrastructure.
Acea's contribution was widely appreciated and achieved great results. This generated the opportunity to take part in a new and even more important EU call: the ECHO Project (European network of Cybersecurity Centres and Competence Hub for Innovation and Operations).
“ECHO is one of 4 projects financed by the EU within the H2020-SU-ICT-2018-2020 call, with a total investment exceeding € 63.5 million. The project features 30 partners from 15 EU Member States", Andrea proudly explains that he was one of the authors of the winning proposal and was thus chosen as Participant Contact of the Acea Group for this project as well.
It must be said that in this kind of projects, participants are never randomly selected. In addition to demonstrating their skills and previous EU project experience, ECHO participants are selected to represent many key industries, like transportation, telecoms, energy. They also reflect other parameters that increase the value of the project results. "There are partners from Estonia, the most digitalized nation in Europe. And we also have a non-EU nation represented in the project: the Ukraine, which was the target of two violent cyber attacks to its electricity infrastructure in 2015 and 2016".
Objectives of the ECHO project
The purpose of the project is the creation of a European network of cybersecurity research and skills centers, in order to improve the European Union's cyber-defense through effective and efficient multi-sectoral collaboration. The work of individual centers will be coordinated by a central hub, with the following objectives:
The energy sector is the area of the ECHO project where Acea will see its biggest involvement initially. "We are developing a series of critical scenarios simulating attacks to the operating and control systems of the Energy infrastructures. This way we will be able to experiment and implement the most effective solutions to raise our security levels and rapidly defend ourselves from future cyber attacks."
Projects like ECHO help to protect us from the risk of large scale cyber attacks. However, each of us needs to pay attention to the way we use technology, in order to avoid falling in cyber traps. “9 out of 10* security breaches are due to lack of attention, when someone clicks on suspicious links or document that may contain malware.”
This is why cybersecurity must begin with a few simple rules, such as always creating different and complex passwords to increase security, accurately guarding our login details, avoiding shopping on unknown e-commerce sites that appear too cheap.
"After all, the NASA network was recently attacked using a simple Raspberry Pi 3, a $35 mini computer, which means that we can never have too much security", Andrea concluded. We can trust his expert opinion.
*“Cyber Risk Management 2018” survey carried out by The Innovation Group between December 2017 and January 2018 among Chief Information Security Officers and Security Managers of medium-sized Italian companies
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