The REWIRE project presented at the ENSURESEC Closing Conference

On May 20th, 2022, the REWIRE Project Manager Andrius Bambalas was invited to participate in the Closing Conference of Horizon2020 project ENSURESEC – End-to-end Security of the Digital Single Market’s E‑commerce and Delivery Service Ecosystem. ENSURESEC involves 14 countries and 22 partners and addressed the whole gamut of modern e‑commerce, from standard physical products purchased online and delivered via post, to entirely virtual products or services delivered online.

During the event, Andrius Bambalas presented the overall scope and goal of REWIRE project, indicated the potential links between the projects and shared some ideas of how the outcomes of ENSURESEC could be further used in REWIRE project activities.

The starting point was the focus on the fact that digitisation of the global economy, professional and personal lives has been continuously progressing, and how important cybersecurity is to such phenomena. However, the workforce and security situation worldwide remain unsatisfactory: the 2021 Cybersecurity Workforce Study estimated that Europe lacked approximately 199 thousand of cybersecurity professionals and the global cybersecurity workforce needs to grow 65% to effectively defend organisations’ critical assets. Regarding the cybersecurity skills situation in the European Union, Member States work on their own frameworks, but there is no consistency across the EU, which leads to non-transferable skills between countries.

Afterwards, the REWIRE Project Manager introduced REWIRE to the participants, which is an Erasmus+ project that includes all 4 winning pilot projects (CONCORDIA, SPARTA, ECHO, CyberSec4Europe). REWIRE engages 24 partners from key stakeholders, including academia and VET, cybersecurity industry non-cyber industries, certification partners and umbrella organisations. The aim of REWIRE is “to set up a sustainable sectoral alliance to develop specific and innovative relevant instruments to address the cybersecurity skills shortage and gap; to match skills demand and supply, define a new common Cybersecurity Skills Framework, which reflects emerging skills and allows training and education institutions to introduce them into training curricula.”

At the end of his intervention, Andrius Bambalas reflected on some aspects that REWIRE could take from ENSURESEC, highlighting the latter allows a better understanding of cybersecurity skills needs in e-commerce, and one of the ENSURESEC deliverables (www.becyberaware.eu) could be useful for users of the CyberABILITY platform being developed by REWIRE.