The Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity LHC is happy to report a successful launch event of the National Cybersecurity Competence Center (NC3). On the 30th of June 2023, Bertrand Lathoud presented the new center and its mission of increasing the resilience of the economy to cyber threats and developing a country-specific cybersecurity industrial base at the Chamber of Commerce Luxembourg. Being the outcome of the merge of two previous departments of the agency, the NC3 relies on a solid experience in prevention, protection, training, and testing in cybersecurity matters. It combines the excellence of experts from severaldomains in order to cover all the dimensions of its mission. The central focus of the NC3 will lie on the needs of SMEs. The presentation showcased three key initiatives of the NC3’s action plan. 

Firstly, the NC3 will support the country’s cybersecurity community through its mission as NCC-LU (A member of the European network of National Competence Centers attached to the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre located in Bucharest), in particular through the distribution of direct aid to security SMEs, as part of the support to broaden applied research in cybersecurity, and develop its industrial base. This will allow to facilitate access to EU funding for SMEs. NCC-LU will announce calls for applications through its website, hosted on nc3.lu.

For the first batch of calls, the priorities that have been defined clearly target SMEs’ needs. Beyond the creation of security focused startups, it will facilitate the development of innovative services centered around testing. This is the first step to make security testing affordable and accessible to SMEs, so that they can increase their resilience by eliminating the most critical weaknesses exposing their systems or products.

The second dimension will be the deployment of a Cybersecurity Observatory to provide essential information to decision makers. Its purpose is to enable business leaders to prioritize more effectively and accurately their resources allocations towards security spendings. It aims also at helping them having informed conversations with their IT and security providers, and assess more easily the relevance of their services and products. This Observatory provides indicators and insights on existing threats. It is also going to focus on identifying market gaps by assessing the actual needs of the ecosystem, and the shortcomings of the existing security offer on the local market.

Lastly a Testing Platform will be implemented which will help Luxembourg's SMEs to identify the most exposed weaknesses for their basic infrastructure, focused on web and email servers. This is the first major step in building a Testing continuum that will have two major impacts on the ecosystem. It will strengthen the resilience of SMEs, which represent more than 80% of Luxembourg’s economy and are undergoing an accelerating digitization. It will also allow these SMEs to increase their competence in Cybersecurity and by doing so, bootstrap their access to the market of existing security products and services.

The NC3 is already engaged in conversation with several security providers in order to design new services that would be hosted on the Testing Platform and would be tailored for SMEs’ needs and requirements.