Online Safety and Security for Protection of Public-Facing Professionals and Democratic Resilience Politician, Reporters, Teachers, Emergency services staff and Police officers are public-facing professionals (PFPs). This means they operate in the public eye with at times dramatic repercussions for their private lives (e.g., ‘trial by social media’, unwanted identification, online harassment and threats to themselves or their families). Online attacks are often framed as a way to ‘redress injustices’ or holding public professionals to account. They, however, can have dramatic negative consequences. Therefore, it is important to better understand the challenges faced by PFPs for their participation in online spaces and provide mechanisms to them and their organisations to effectively safeguard, manage and mitigate against these risks. OSPREY will build a knowledge base for PFP-specific risks, harms, protection needs and harm impacts, focusing on mapping shared and profession-specific risk profiles and safeguarding requirements; create a comprehensive knowledge-base on attack vectors and motivations of perpetrators across to understand disparate types/motivations (e.g., personal grievances, ideological driven campaigns, foreign political campaigns) to guide improved protection approaches; co-create advanced AI tools, mechanisms and solutions shaped for PFP-specific challenges empowering secure participation in online spaces; toolkits and trainings to improve knowledge of PFPs, their employing organisations, LEAs and law/policy makers how to prevent, manage and mitigate online harms as well as legislate for better safety of PFPs; improve public awareness on online harm impacts, including practical approaches to allyship and bystander activation.

AI is transforming law enforcement, offering new tools for policing but also enabling advanced criminal tactics that challenge traditional methods. The global nature of crime, including cyber threats, trafficking, and terrorism, calls for innovative solutions as LEAs face vast data volumes and increasingly sophisticated criminal activities. AI has raised concerns with deepfakes—highly realistic but fake audio, video, or text that can depict individuals saying or doing things they never did. Deepfakes pose serious risks, impacting politics, economy, and social trust. Examples include fabricated videos of political figures and voice-cloned audio for financial fraud, often spread through social networks to deceive and defraud on a large scale. Forensic institutes and courts struggle to differentiate authentic evidence from AI fabrications, especially in cases involving national security. Despite promising detection research, existing methods fall short as current models rely on limited, non-diverse datasets and produce results with limited legal admissibility. The DETECTOR initiative aims to address these challenges, supporting LEAs and forensic experts in analyzing altered media. It offers an integrated solution through cross-border collaboration among AI researchers, LEAs, forensic scientists, legal experts, and ethicists. DETECTOR’s goals include: developing specialized tools for detecting media manipulation, creating comprehensive datasets, researching digital evidence exchange across borders, engaging stakeholders, informing policymakers, and training forensic experts in digital media and AI. Through these efforts, DETECTOR seeks to safeguard digital evidence authenticity and enhance forensic capabilities to counter AI-driven media manipulation across Europe

LAGO will deliver the foundation for a trusted EU FTC Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) to address the so-called “Data Issue” in the FCT research landscape, i.e., the lack of domain-specific data in sufficient quality and quantity to enable appropriate training and testing of the developed methods, platforms and tools. LAGO will be instrumental in identifying common barriers and subsequently providing the structural, governance and technical foundations to foster and innovate data-oriented research collaboration among LEAs, security practitioners, relevant EU agencies, academic and industry researchers, policy makers and regulators. For this purpose, LAGO will develop an evidence-based and validated multi-actor Reference Architecture for the FCT RDE for these actors to deposit, share and co-create data and tools for FCT research purposes based on common rules, protocols, standards and instruments in a trusted and secured environment. The envisaged Reference Architecture and accompanying governance framework will be based on the design principles of decentralisation, data sovereignty, data quality, openness, transparency and trust and comply with EU values and principles on data protection, privacy and ethics. The Reference Architecture will be accompanied by a TRL-7 Reference Implementation of added-value technological tools to ensure practical realisation of the Reference Architecture as multiple data spaces and across the full range of concrete usage scenarios. A Roadmap will finally provide the consolidated rules, conditions and considerations for the actual deployment of the EU FCT RDE. The ultimate ambition of LAGO is to go beyond the creation of a common repository in order to innovate the FCT data-oriented research sphere by creation the crucial foundations for the sustainable, safe and trusted creation, co-creation, sharing and maintenance of training and testing datasets for the FCT research domain.

ATLANTIS aims at enhancing resilience and Cyber-Physical-Human (CPH) security of the key EU Critical Infrastructures, going beyond the scope of distinct assets, systems, and single CI, by addressing resilience at the systemic level against major natural hazards and complex attacks that could potentially disrupt vital functions of the society. The mission of ATLANTIS, which involves 39 European partners with complementary roles and skills, is to improve the resilience and the protection capabilities of interconnected ECI exposed to evolving systemic risks due to existing and emerging large-scale, combined, cyber-physical threats and hazards, guarantee the continuity of operations, while minimizing cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment, other CIs, and the involved population, enabling public and private actors to meet current and emerging challenges by adopting sustainable security solutions. The mission of ATLANTIS will be achieved by - Improving knowledge on large-scale, vulnerability assessment and long-term systemic risks. - Improving the systemic resilience of ECI, through novel, adaptive, flexible, and customizable security measures (“by design”) and tools (“by innovation”). - Improving effective cooperation among CI operators and government security stakeholders, while preserving CI autonomy and sovereignty. - Delivering an open TRL-7 technological framework that will provide the ECIs with AI -based solutions for increased AWARENESS, CAPABILITY and COOPERATION in managing systemic threats. The ATLANTIS solution will be validated and demonstrated in 3 large-scale cross-border and cross-sector pilots: - LSP#1: Cross-Border/Cross Domain Large Scale Pilot in Transport, Energy and Telecoms (Slovenia, Croatia, Italy and France); - LSP#2: Cross Domain Large Scale Pilot in Health, Logistics/Supply Chain and Border control (Cyprus, Greece and Croatia); - LSP#3: Cross-Country Large-Scale Pilot in FinTech/Financial (Spain, Germany, Cyprus).