Ionize has been awarded a Federal Government Grant through the Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) Round 15 opportunity to deliver Project DFNDR: Adaptive Cyber Security for Defence and Critical Infrastructure SMEs.
Project DFNDR will be delivered in partnership between Ionize, Cybermerc and the University of Canberra through a groundbreaking initiative dedicated to streamlining cyber threat detection, network defence, response and recovery for small to medium enterprises (SME).
With federal funding awarded through the Cooperative Research Centres Project, Andrew Muller CEO of Ionize sees Project DFNDR as tangible evidence of a partnership and solution approach within the cyber security industry. “Technological advancement and innovation cannot occur without strong partnerships across private enterprise, research institutions and government. For Australia to continue to be at the forefront of global innovation in cyber security, we need to collaborate across our industry and importantly with academia; advancing technological solutions is driven by data, analysis and lessons learned”.
A key element of Project DFNDR is an integrated managed security service with cyber threat intelligence sharing, delivering proactive and adaptive cyber defences.
This creates a simple and effective measure to understand the cyber threat environment for an organisation. Matthew Nevin, CEO of Cybermerc encounters “the numerous security challenges faced by organisations every day. Project DFNDR aims to simplify and strengthen SMEs cyber security by providing a complete service across threat hunting, monitoring and intelligence to mitigate cyber attacks and share information on Advanced Persistent Threats.”
The rapid adoption of technology and its increasing use across all levels of personal and professional domains has undoubtedly expanded the surface for attacks.
Dr Abu Barkat Ullah, Associate Professor Information Technology and Systems at the University of Canberra knows that “the ability to predict, prevent and identify cyber threats attempting to exploit networks is a valuable resource and academia and research have crucial roles to play in attaining this. Through our analysis and research of the telemetry provided by companies participating in Project DFNDR, researchers will have access to a significant data lake to support the development of an adaptive cyber security solution.”
Prioritisation for participation in the project will be given to companies operating within or delivering services to defence and critical infrastructure industries.
As part of the project, companies that choose to participate will incur no costs during proof of concept, expected to take between 12 – 15 months.
The objective of the CRC-P program is to:
- improve the competitiveness, productivity and sustainability of Australian industries, especially where Australia has a competitive strength, and in alignment with government priorities;
- foster high quality research to solve industry-identified problems through an industry-led and outcome-focused collaborative research partnerships, especially involving research organisations
- encourage and facilitate small and medium enterprise (SME) participation in collaborative research.
