SAFECARE: SAFEguard of Critical heAlth infrastructuRE

Over the last decade the European Union (EU) has faced numerous threats that quickly escalated in their magnitude, changing the lives, the habits and the fears of hundreds of millions of citizens. The sources of these threats have been heterogeneous, as well as the modality by which these attacks have been conducted against the population. As Europeans, we now know that we must increase our awareness of both physical attacks that can strike the places we rely upon the most, and cyber-attacks that can hit the very core of our institutions, creating panic and destruction in its own right. It is therefore essential to develop a common approach regarding the protection of our critical infrastructures. Health infrastructures are among the most vulnerable when it comes to targeted attacks. By targeting these health centres, cyber criminality has a new lever that has not been used yet, and terrorist organizations will most certainly use it to destabilize Europe. From this perspective, we focus our attention on health services as we consider them as highly sensitive targets in need of an immediate assessment. Health services are largely relying on information systems to optimize organization and costs whereas ethics and privacy constraints severely restrict cyber security controls and thus increase vulnerability. Today, the lines between the physical and the cyber world are increasingly blurred: nearly everything is connected to the Internet. Threats cannot be analyzed solely as physical or cyber, and it is therefore critical to develop an integrated view. The aim of this proposal is to provide an integrated solution for assessing the aforementioned threats and adapt existing critical health infrastructures in a seamless and cost-effective manner. The project will build a holistic approach that will take into account both physical and cybersecurity. It will promote new technologies and novel techniques to enhance prevention, detection, response and mitigation capacities against security threats. The project will also participate in increasing the compliance between security tools and European regulations about ethics and privacy for health services. Finally, project pilots will take place in critical tier-1 infrastructures in the sector, such as the hospitals of Marseille, Turin, and Amsterdam involving crisis practitioners and first-responders, in order to simulate attack scenarios in near-real conditions. These project pilots will serve as reference examples to disseminate the results and find customers across Europe.