Two decades ago, a group of information security experts out of Flanders, Belgium decided to create an asociation to create and support a network of experts, to support the development of the domain and to help innovating in the space. The year was 2002. Just ample time before, the same group of experts introduced the AES encryption algorythm and the electronic identity card (eID card) into this world. What started with a small team of motivated individuals, seven supporting companies and a university turned into a group of over 800 industrial entities working on CyberSecurity and reaching out to over 15.000 organizations. LSEC today still works to create awareness and motivate individuals and organizations in improving their CyberSecurity postures, activities, organisation, processes and procedures on a daily basis. We provide insights, technical expertise and access to experts. LSEC supports its members in helping them to innovate with technologies to improve their products and services. LSEC facilitates interactions between its Members and motivates exchange of expertise on international basis. In 2022 and beyond we will continue doing so, supporting our Members getting access to customers and to experts, getting access to expertise and to resources, trying to mature the overall society by its private and public citizens, showcasing new ways to improve CyberSecurity and indicating where things go wrong. After two decades our societal role has only grown together with the intensitiy of its main subject : ensuring a digital life, but in a secure and efficient manner. CyberSecurity should continue to be an enabler to today's digital transactions, but also in an ethical and economic viable way. We continue to search for innovative technologies, methods and methodologies supporting this vision alongside a continuously challenging environment of basic electronic sanity, organised crime and other cybercrime, old and new vulnerabilities and exploitations of physical and electronic systems operating applications and transforming information and data. Everyday CyberSecurity becomes more complex, but the same day tens and hundreds of talented youngster are being educated in the various domains of interesting CyberSecurity topics. Over the next years we aim to reach again to thousands of CyberSecurity professionals, helping them improving their expertise, knowledge and skills in improving CyberSecurity and inspiring them to further mature the organizations they operate in. By innovating, we will continue to make our digital world and the society as a whole a better and safer place for all. Join us during our activities in 2022 and beyond, and join the community by participating actively and supporting and inspiring its further growth. Thanks to all for your 20 years of support!

SECURIT – NEW INDUSTRIAL VALUE CHAIN FOR SAFE, SECURE AND RESILIENT CITIES AND  TERRITORIES

Visit the webinar-recording of the first Open Call on the LSEC Securit-project page.

LSEC participates in the the next three years in a project to financially support innovative CyberSecurity companies in Europe. SecurIT is a European project aiming at supporting and co-financing the development of collaborative projects allowing prototyping and experimentation of top-notch technological solutions in the field of Security, with respect of the nowadays ethics, legal, and social challenges.

SecurIT will support 63 best-in-class projects developped by 126 SMEs across Europe, through 2 cascade funding open calls, with a financing up to 74 k€ per prototyping projects and 88 k€ per demonstrator projects.

First Open Call for projects: From January to March 2022 

• Second Open Call for projects: From February 2023 to April 2023 (TBC)

Safe Cluster, Pôle SCS, LSEC, Belgium, L3CE, Lithuania, Hague Security Delta (HSD), The Netherlands, Systematic Paris-Région, France, CenSec, Denmark, FundingBox, Poland

On October 24th,  the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepeneurship VLAIO announced the approval for COOCK IIoTSBOM.

According to different research organisations CyberSecurity challenges are continuously increasing, despite major authority interventions and different measures being taken in an atempt to fight the perpetrators and criminals behind them. A recent report on the continuous study by Blackfog showed the continued increase in ransomware attacks and the increased success of attacks resulting into major incidents throughout the world. Different sectors and industries are being impacted, none the least in Europe and in industrial sectors, healthcare and utilities. But all sectors impacted are digitizing at a vast pace, utilizing devices and equipment which are being connected. While this trend is encouraging for organisational efficiency, the systems used and underlying technologies should become more resilient against potential vulnerabilities that can be exploited and attacked. 

IIoTSBOM aims to support end user organisations, machine and device manufacturers to further improve their security measures by supporting them with valuable knowledge and expertise in specific innovative cybersecurity means for Industrial IoT and IoT and by introducing the Software and Security Bill of Materials (SBOM). 

In a collaboration with the CyberSecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency  (CISA) of the US government, LSEC - Leaders In Security, KU Leuven COSIC and Flanders Make have launched the initiative in Flanders to ensure awareness and adoption of the Software Bill of Materials initiatives. On May 12th, the Whitehouse by means of an executive order decided on the further improvement of the CyberSecurity infrastructures also focusing on the supply chain by means of the Software Bill of Materials. 

Next to technical measures for improvements of CyberSecurity in the software and devices, the Software and Security Bill of Materials aims to support companies developing devices to create a ledger about the software on the equipment, providing more transparency about the technologies being used and their respective versioning. This allows both vendor, system integrator and the final end user and their operators to get a better grip on the equipment they are procuring and need to operationalizer over time. 

Earlier successes in this approach have been proven in the healthcare and automotive domains and will be demonstrated throughout the activities of the IIoTSBOM project. 

The IIoTSBOM project will promote the available technical and CyberSecurity expertise to a broad group of target audiences and aims to facilitate the use of SBOMs for device manfucturing by supporting end users in their procurement; device and equipment manufacturers in their product lifecycle management for CyberSecurity and CyberSecurity innovators in developing tools and technologies improving CyberSecurity and the SBOM-proces. 

The resulting effect will be a better CyberSecurity Posture of the whole society.

On December 8th from 10am to 4pm, IIoTSBOM will organize a hybrid kick-off meeting with a focus on CyberSecurity challenges for industry, for manufacturing and how CyberSecurity methods and solutions can help both end users and device manufacturers improving on the security for a more secure supply chain. For more information and the agenda, please visit the events page and go to the developing IIoTSBOM.com website. 

Participating is free, after using the following registration link 

For more information, contact us at iiotsbom at lsec.eu, or call directly at +32 16 79 8585. 

On September 7th,  organized by LSEC together with Amazon AWS (Web Services) and CSAI, organize a webinar on cloud based Artificial Intelligence for CyberSecurity

On September 7th from 1 to 4pm, LSEC and Amazon AWS organize a special semi-public event on the use of AI tools for CyberSecurity activities and developments. During this afternoon session Amazon AWS brings together its AI and CS experts to demonstrate how AWS can be used for cloud-based AI developments.

This session is part of our activities of the VLAIO CS-ICON 2019-2020 CSAI project (CyberSecurity Artificial Intelligence), in which LSEC collaborates with co-dex.eu; spotit.be and axs-guard.be in relation with its research partners from KU Leuven (Distrinet and COSIC) and the VUB AI Lab.
During the session, the purpose is to learn from AWS offerings on how to be able to setup AWS for AIOps, utilizing specialized capabilities and tools and to join us for some further Proof of Concept developments together with our joint research partners.

LSEC has already been actively investigating services offerings from IBM Cloud services, Google and Alibaba and is looking to further research and document gained experiences from our members and partners, aiming to support its members in seizing this opportunity further and improving capabilities and efficiencies using AI. This will be a semi-public session, meaning that invitations are limited to those relevant and that access even after registration can always be restricted in consideration together with our partner AWS.

Participating is free, but you'll have to be part of our network and announce yourself to get the registration link 

Announce yourself by sending a request to csai at lsec.eu, or call directly at +32 16 79 8585. 

On June 24th,  organized by Flanders Make with the support of LSEC and PwC, organize a webinar on CyberSecurity for Industry 4.0

Already for nearly a decade, Flanders Make and LSEC partner together in multiple activities supporting each other, and helping innovation in their respective Member Communities in both CyberSecurity and Manufacturing. Both work together in the European project TRINITY, a Digital Innovation Hub for agile manufacturing, robotics and CyberSecurity. Nearly 50 projects will be financially supported in their innovations in manufactutring thanks to TRINITY.  In the recently launched DigiHub project, both of them join VOKA in bringing digitalization to SME's in Flanders. Any Flemish production company seeking to improve their CyberSecurity for means of Industry 4.0 can reach out to both and get professional support, financial support from the region and additional support in implementation through the CyberSecurity improvement projects by PwC and VLAIO. 

Find out more why CyberSecurity should be an integrated part of your digitalization strategy and how these three partners can support you in making that happen. 

Participating is free, but you'll have to register. 

LSEC and Flanders Make work together on future CyberSecurity innovations and digitalization of Flanders and Industry 4.0 or beyond. PwC is a member of LSEC.

On June 11th,  organized by Insightz.io with the support of LSEC and CyberTogether (IS) join forces for a special Women in the cyber security industry event.

With contributions by the following experts in CyberSecurity: 

09.00 : opening by Ulrich Seldeslachts, LSEC

09.15 : The use of CCM 4 (& CAIQ4), by Daniele Cattedu, CTO CSA (Cloud Security Alliance)

10.00 : Your Cloud Security Journey, Zero Trust Approach, Frederick Verduyckt & Maarten Keisers - VMWare & Fujitsu

10.45 : Ransomware is rising, do you have a plan, Pieter Vereecken, Veeam

11.30: Silver Linings : Immune System Technology for Cloud & SaaS, Jelte Orij, Darktrace

13.00 : European Cloud Strategies, Pierre Chastanet, European Commission 

13.45 : Demystifying Cloud Security, David De Vos, Proximus

14.30 : Fulfilling the promise of cloud-based analytics and workloads with data centric security, Micro Focus

15.15 : Endpoint Security : from the cloud, strategy beyond 2021 : Manage Engine

16.00 : Protecting Privacy in AI and Cloud World : FIT4Privacy 

Participating is free, but you'll have to register. Alll sessions are publicly available on the Insightz.io platform.

To go directly to the sessions, after login or registration, the ongoing sessions.

LSEC and Insightz.io (Brewery of Ideas)  work together on the CyberSecurity Conference, the Cloud Summit and Industrry4.0 conferences.