Cardiff University And Airbus To Open Cyber Security Centre Of Excellence

The Cardiff University School of Computer Science and Informatics will be the home of a Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Analytics, to be launched in partnership with Airbus.

The centre will carry out research into next-generation areas of cyber security such as machine learning, data analytics and artificial intelligence, with the aim of protecting corporate IT networks and critical infrastructure.

It will also attempt to plug the growing skills gap plaguing the cyber security industry by developing industry-relevant academic programmes.

Centre of excellence

The centre will draw expertise from various disciplines across the university and comes as part of a knowledge sharing agreement with Airbus that could also include industrial placements for researchers and students.

“Cyber security analytics is about improving our resilience to cyber attacks through data modelling to detect and block malicious behaviour before it causes its full impact, and also about understanding what motivates the behaviour, what its likely impact will be, and how to communicate security alerts among decision and policy-makers,” said the centre’s director Pete Burnap.

Kevin Jones, head of cyber security innovation at Airbus added that collaborations with organisations such as Cardiff University “is a key approach in the future protection of critical systems”, noting that the centre will be designed to enable speedy transfer of research and operational activity, while providing researchers with access to data and the latest cyber security techniques.

Businesses are undoubtedly facing a serious problem. The UK government recently released a survey finding that half of UK businesses suffered a security breach last year, adding to the British Chambers of Commerce findings that one in five UK businesses has suffered some kind of cyber attack.

And the government is certainly playing its part in boosting the UK’s cyber security prowess. GCHQ, for example, has chosen the first seven startups to join its Cyber Accelerator programme and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) opened in October to help defend Britain from hackers.

Scotland’s first cyber security centre of excellence also opened at the University Of Edinburgh earlier this month, as the battle against the bad guys shows no signs of slowing.

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