FORWARD Project (EU Project)

FORWARD is a European Commission funded initiative that aims to promote the collaboration and partnership between Academia and Industry in their common goal of protecting Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructures. Communication networks and computers are under constant Cyber-threats from malicious users and organizations that use viruses, worms, spyware, botnets, spam, and phishing, to harm the European citizens and organizations.

The FORWARD initiative aims at identifying, networking, and coordinating the multiple research efforts that are underway in the area of Cyber-threats defenses, and leveraging these efforts with other activities to build secure and trusted ICT systems and infrastructures. Primarily the efforts will focus on:

• Establishing working groups to review the evolution of the threat landscape and the state of the art in threat detection and prevention techniques. Discussing priorities of the research agendas to be pursued in Europe.
• Organizing workshops with relevant groups of experts from industry and academia but also with policy-makers for discussing and presenting the emerging threat landscape, the ongoing research that deals with these threats, and the recommended actions to be taken by industry and governments.
• Leveraging the findings of individual working groups to describe scenarios in which adversaries use a combination of attacks to pose a threat to the security and disrupt the lives the European Union residents or its member states.