Funding opportunities for strengthening cybersecurity capabilities

In its second work programme on Cybersecurity, the Digital Europe Programme 2023-2024 aims at further building upon the European Union’s cybersecurity capabilities, while strengthening its resilience in line with the EU Cybersecurity Strategy.

Recent events, such as the global pandemic and wars, have shown the importance of having more robust European systems and solutions. Disruptions in such systems not only have a devastating impact on economies, but also on the lives of people.

This funding programme aims at supporting improvements in threat detection and cyber incident analysis ecosystems, strengthening existing SOC ecosystems, and assisting member states in increasing their resilience and level of protection against cyber threats. It also intends in building capacity and cooperation at a technical, operational, and strategic level.

This programme also supports breakthroughs in important technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Quantum, Blockchain, High Performance Computing and Software-Defined Networking that can improve detection and prevention, while creating innovative ideas to make it more difficult for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities.

These technologies not only provide tools that automate the analysis process of large amounts of data, but also allows organisations to employ such solutions on a large scale and in complex environments.

Through the call DIGITAL-ECCC-2024-DEPLOY-CYBER-07-KEYTECH – Development and Deployment of Advanced Key Technologies, organisations can invest in different breakthrough technologies, tools, and systems to improve threat detection, incident response, malware defence, vulnerability management, data protection and others. The beneficiaries will benefit from services which can implement measures that address real-time monitoring and incident response; improve their defence against malware; identify weaknesses and address them through vulnerability scanning and penetration testing; safeguard sensitive data; improve incident investigation and harnessing data for analysis while preserving its security and privacy.

This call is intended for tech companies, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that support private and public organisations with cyber threat detection and Cyber Threat Information (CTI). This call is open to companies, entities and organisations within Member States and EEA countries.

The call DIGITAL-ECCC-2024-DEPLOY-CYBER-07-KEYTECH – Development and Deployment of Advanced Key Technologies provides support through Simple Grants of up to a 50 per cent funding rate to organisations, which will mostly use this funding on personnel costs to implement action tasks. Through SME Support Actions, SMEs building up and deploying digital capacities will also be assisted. This funding opportunity can also be used if SMEs need to be in a consortium and make investments to access the digital capacities. In that case, the financial support is of 50 per cent of the funds, except for SMEs where a rate of 75 per cent applies. The projects funded by this call will be managed by the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC).

The deadline for submitting your proposals is 21st January 2025.

MITA-NCC aims to promote EU funding opportunities within Maltese territory and provide technical assistance to Maltese entities to apply for EU-funding calls.

In this manner, information on this call for proposals is available on the MITA -NCC website. For further queries about these calls, you can contact the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre on ncc.mita@gov.mt.

This article is co-funded by the European Union.