Enhanced Cooperation for Cybersecurity project plans to strengthen European cybersecurity
Enhanced Cooperation for Cybersecurity project plans to strengthen European cybersecurity
Publish Date: 2026-04-03 16:07:00
Source Domain: www.controlglobal.com
The European research and innovation project Enhanced Cooperation for Cybersecurity (Enforcers) kicked off on Feb. 10-11 at Wibu-Systems AG in Karlsruhe, Germany. The project brings together a consortium of industrial manufacturers, cybersecurity providers, and applied research organizations to address one of Europe’s most pressing challenges—ensuring resilient, trustworthy software throughout the lifecycle of industrial automation systems. The group met at the kickoff to settle on Enforcers’ strategic roadmap for the next three years, and set the stage for close cross-border collaboration enabled by European Union (EU) funding.
The organization reports it’s designed to go beyond isolated security measures. Its primary objective is closing the loop between cybersecurity incident detection, coordinated response, certification and secure software redistribution in industrial environments. This is particularly relevant for automation and manufacturing, where software must often be updated across segmented, partially disconnected or heterogeneous operations technology (OT) networks.
Consequently, the project’s core is a cybersecurity system platform that links multiple trusted instances into a securely chained “system circle” that includes:
- Private security operation centers (SOC) that collect, correlate, and classify incident and vulnerability data;
- Secure elements that act as trust anchors at OT edges and gateways;
- Automated playbooks for vulnerability mitigation, certification and secure software updates; and
- Cross-border, data-exchange mechanisms that allow SOCs and stakeholders to cooperate while respecting data sovereignty.
Enforcers adds its approach directly supports compliance with the Network and Information Security 2 (NIS2) directive, and anticipates requirements of the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), while remaining adaptable to future regulatory and technological developments.
“Enforcers brings together technologies, processes and…
