A new project to strengthen response of research and education community to cyber threats

In response to the growing cyber threats and weak response within the research and education community in Africa, WACREN and Shadowserver are jointly implementing a new pilot project to capacitate national research and education networks (NRENs) and, by extension, the research and education community to reposition themselves to handle cyber threats on their infrastructure.

The nine-month pilot project aims to create a robust cyber threat intelligence platform for WACREN’s constituency while offering valuable cyber threat landscape insights to national CSIRTs participating in TrustBroker Africa to help coordinate their decision-making and response to cyber threats.

The project aligns with the broader goals of the Joint Platform for Advancing Cybersecurity, which was created by the ECOWAS Commission in partnership with the German Federal Foreign Office and co-funded by the European Union and the AfricaConnect project (funded by the European Commission).

In the project, WACREN will establish an IntelMQ instance that will harvest daily threat intelligence data from Shadowserver’s system for NRENs participating in the project. This includes connected NRENs in Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo. The project will also extend potential advantages to other countries like Senegal, Guinea, and The Gambia, which are set to join WACREN’s network in 2025. Through the project, WACREN is expected to become a regional cyber threat intelligence hub for its constituency, enhancing NREN’s ability to mitigate vulnerabilities and address cyber threats in real time.

In addition to delivering the platform, WACREN and Shadowserver will also provide relevant, tailored training sessions, the first of which will be held as a pre-event at the 10th Annual WACREN Conference in Dakar, to build the knowledge base and skill set of the NREN community, especially NREN CSIRTs. This will improve their understanding of actionable cyber threat data and strengthen their technical capabilities to interpret and address vulnerabilities.

One of the project’s cornerstone outputs is the development of an ECOWAS Internet Threat Landscape Report. This high-level document, drawing from Shadowserver’s unique datasets, will provide critical insights into cybersecurity challenges within the region. It will empower ECOWAS policy and decision-makers and CSIRTs with actionable insights and intelligence to shape national and regional cybersecurity strategies and threat responses.