COMPACT to help Local Public Administration with cybersecurity

The COMPACT project started in May 2017 and takes on an integrated approach to improve cyber resilience in Local Public Administration (LPA) by offering services and tools of risk assessment, awareness raising, threat monitoring and detection, and information sharing. Taking into account the fact that organisations need to address the human factor in cybersecurity, the project will develop and implement an innovative gamification approach to raise awareness among LPA employees.

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COMPACT aims to empower Local Public Administrations (LPAs) to become the main actors of their own cyber resilience improvement process. In order to achieve it, COMPACT will develop an integrated approach which includes risk assessment tools, training services, threat monitoring services and knowledge sharing services.

Responding to the call from H2020 Societal Challenges, COMPACT sets out to improve cybersecurity for SMEs, local public administration and individuals by addressing the specifics of local public authorities and especially focusing on the risk of human error not always effectively dealt with by most technological solutions affordable to LPAs. Often due to their size and budget constraints, these organisations fail to implement highly granular organisational structures, to retain dedicated information personnel, and to invest in cybersecurity products and services.

With COMPACT, which puts great focus on the human factor in cybersecurity, employees from local public authorities will benefit from the training and information sharing services that will allow them to learn how to identify cyber threats in their daily work and to reduce risky behaviour. This will be achieved through an innovative gamification approach based on psychological studies in 5 European municipalities: Betrieb für Informationstechnologie Bremerhaven (Germany), Afragola and Bologna (Italy), Donostia San-Sebastián (Spain), and Amadora (Portugal).

Combined with risk assessment and monitoring tools, these services will be part of an integrated approach featuring wide applicability, usability, automation, and flexibility. Focusing on functionality and easy-to-use interface the COMPACT platform will be cloud-enabled and cloud-ready. According to Paolo Roccetti, Project Coordinator, this will allow for 'improving the level of protection of LPAs against most relevant threats through an innovative and cost-effective approach.'

Keywords

Cybersecurity, Local Public Administration, Awareness, Training, Threat Monitoring and Detection, Risk Assessment, Information Sharing, Gamification

Countries

Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, United Kingdom