Project description
Understanding humanitarian organisations’ cyber resilience
Humanitarian organisations use digital tools in their aid missions. This approach, however, makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks, which can disrupt operations and compromising personal data. Technical fixes are prioritised over broader resilience and vulnerability concerns. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CYBERAID project will examine how humanitarian organisations build cyber resilience in response to digital threats. It will conduct document analysis, interviews, and fieldwork, particularly in Ukraine, where cyber risks are high due to the conflict with Russia. The project will also develop policy recommendations for protecting operations and vulnerable populations.
Objective
Humanitarian organizations increasingly rely on digital infrastructures such as biometric registration, cloud platforms, and digital cash transfers to deliver aid. While these tools improve efficiency and traceability, they also expose humanitarian actors and crisis-affected populations to serious digital risks. Recent years have seen cyberattacks disrupt operations, compromise sensitive data, and raise critical protection concerns. These incidents are not isolated technical failures but politically and ethically significant events revealing structural weaknesses in digital governance. As digital threats intensify, humanitarian actors face pressure to sustain essential operations under cyber duress. Yet prevailing responses focus narrowly on technical fixes, compliance, or restoring functionality, with little attention to how resilience is shaped by organizational routines, governance structures, and external constraints, or whose vulnerabilities are prioritised or overlooked. CYBERAID addresses this gap by conceptualising cyber-resilience as a socio-technical process. It investigates how humanitarian organizations respond to digital threats, what factors shape cyber-resilience-building strategies, and how benefits and risks are distributed. The comparative design examines the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Refugee Agency, and Welthungerhilfe, combining document analysis, expert interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork in headquarters and country offices. Ukraine is included as a key site, as it is among the largest recipients of humanitarian funding and faces increasing cyber threats and documented cyberattacks linked to the war with Russia. CYBERAID will deliver the first systematic study of cyber-resilience in the humanitarian sector, advance an analytical framework for organizational cybersecurity, and generate actionable policy recommendations for protecting operations and affected populations in high-risk environments.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology demography human migrations
- natural sciences computer and information sciences computer security
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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5230 Odense M
Denmark
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