Antwerpen, Bonheiden, Brussel, Gent and Leuven, Belgium, February 1st, 2022. A team of three Flemish technology and services companies and three research groups have started working on the APAX project. A two-year project, Automated Posture Analysis that Scales (APAX) will investigate the risks related to the digital presence of online assets in an automated manner that can adapt itself to the requirements of hyper scaling. The goal of the project is to achieve a higher level of cybersecurity and avoid negative impact from vulnerabilities such as Log4J by maximising the usage of automated processes.
Industry project partners Awingu, Ceeyu and Toreon will join forces to research, explore and build technologies thanks to a cybersecurity funding initiative from VLAIO, the Flemish government agency for innovation and entrepreneurship. The three companies will apply ongoing research and inspire academics for future work to help automate the analysis of threats and challenges in cybersecurity. They will do so using the expertise from research partners VUB Software Languages Lab and VUB Artificial Intelligence Lab, together with industry association LSEC.
Limited resources
With the ongoing digitalization and continuous evolving cloud, internet technologies and applications running on them, new cybersecurity challenges appear while many older ones have not yet been resolved. The recent Log4J vulnerability that started early December 2021 continues to ripple throughout 2022 and will likely last for months or even years to come. The vulnerability kept cybersecurity teams busy during the end-of-year holiday period. All systems and applications needed to be inspected and analysed for potential business risks that needed mitigation. Most organizations identified this as a labour-intensive activity, eating away their limited resources. They realised that an automated approach to protection, is a better way to go.
Maximize automation
The fundamental goal of the APAX project is to avoid malicious activities to happen and to avoid active business systems and applications from being inaccessible, infringed, unreliable, held hostage or being abused to trade illicit content. To keep up with these challenges and evolutions, cybersecurity will need to evolve from a manual, labour-intensive approach to automated prevention, detection, mitigation, reaction, incident handling, process management, reporting, analysis, and recovery. This must, of course, happen in close collaboration with the operating parties, supporting businesses, people, and processes.
Increase efficiency
The APAX project partners will work on improving minimally 50 partially automated assessments for cybersecurity postures. Further automation will increase the efficiency of cybersecurity experts and halve the time spent on each individual case. Maximizing automation decreases the cybersecurity reaction time and reduces the repetitive work of security specialists, allowing them to focus on their expert work.
About Version 2
Version 2 is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Parallels
Parallels® is a global leader in cross-platform solutions, enabling businesses and individuals to access and use the applications and files they need on any device or operating system. Parallels helps customers leverage the best technology available, whether it’s Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android or the cloud.
About Ceeyu
Ceeyu provides a cloud-based analysis of a company’s digital presence, outside-in. This posture analysis displays all IT assets visible to any internet user, including malicious ones applying a similar analysis to gather intelligence to determine their attack paths. Ceeyu aims to quickly expand its intelligence gathering, support to standardize the results and automate the analysis to minimize its cost and provide continuously near real-time posture analysis.
About Toreon
Toreon is the largest Flemish originated cybersecurity expert services company. Grown from a team of specialized professionals, the company expanded rapidly organically. Toreon analyses the cybersecurity posture from the inside-out. A cybersecurity analysis can quickly require between 100 and 200 different scans that need to be executed, resulting in information that requires analysis. To optimize its services to its customers, but also to optimize the internal expert resources, Toreon has started to automate these analyses, but aims to further expand this process automation and by adding automated intelligence.
About VUB Labs
The VUB Software Languages Lab and the VUB Artificial Intelligence Lab are both innovative engineering departments from one of the leading Flemish universities in Belgium. Both have a long-standing scientific and industry-supporting background. Their expertise from the domain of applying AI-based automation and fuzzing technologies will be supporting the technology companies throughout the two-year project.
About LSEC
LSEC, an industry association that celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2022 will be focusing on the standardization work for automated postures, in relation to third party risk management analysis and relaying to developing industry standards in the US and EU. For more information, please contact Ulrich Seldeslachts, MD LSEC, Sebastien Deleersnyder, CTO Toreon, or any of the industry and scientific partners.
