CYBER4All STAR

Engaging Bulgarian (and European) SMEs, mid-caps and public sector organizations (PSOs) in wide-scale digital transformation has been a challenging endeavor over the past decade. Costs reduction, operations efficiency optimization, and citizens’ empowerment triggered deployment of diverse ICT technologies across the Union, however at disparate speed and penetration levels, and often in a fragmented mode.

Imminent cybersecurity threats ranging from lower level impact attacks, e.g. script kiddies, malware, etc. to highly sophisticated operations launched by cyber terrorists or state-sponsored actors are major challenges, which seem to be equally ambiguously addressed across the Union, leaving some stakeholders significantly more vulnerable than others. Ca. 60% of Dutch and German SMEs maintain log files for analysis after security incidents,while only 16-20% of Romanian and Bulgarian SMEs find it important to analyze those. Likewise, a cybersecurity breach landmark event of occurred in 2019 when the Bulgarian National Revenues Agency database was hacked, and personal data of more than 70% of all Bulgarian nationals was released online. 

To bridge the cybersecurity divide in Bulgaria and the EU, the Digital Innovation Hub "Trakia" was formed as an association in the South-Central Region of Bulgaria in 2021, and the "CYBER4AllSTAR" EDIH project was launched in early 2023, offering cybersecurity expertise, access to experimentation facilities and services, access to finance, and ecosystem networking with disruptive technology suppliers in line with the EDIH Trakia service proposition.

The Hub, coordinated by the oldest business union in Bulgaria (UPEE, member of ECSO), in collaboration with other Cybersecurity EDIHs across Europe (via the European Corridor of Cybersecurity EDIHs, initiated in 2022 by ECSO), is intended to offer a full range of cybersecurity services to all stakeholders with a special focus on SMEs, mid-caps and PSOs. Additionally, AI and HPC services are foreseen to be channeled to end users using the EDIH Network DTA-assisted capabilities. 

The ultimate goal is to make it easy, cost-efficient and technologically-friendly to learn about and to adopt cybersecurity solutions, powered by HPC and AI (among other technologies) on a mass and integrated scale.