Canberra-based cyber security company Ionize has been awarded a federal government grant worth $3 million through the Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) Round 15, to deliver Project DFNDR: Adaptive Cyber Security for Defence and Critical Infrastructure SMEs.
Project DFNDR will be delivered in a partnership between Ionize, Cybermerc and the University of Canberra dedicated to streamlining cyber threat detection, network defence, response and recovery for small to medium enterprises (SME).
“Technological advancement and innovation cannot occur without strong partnerships across private enterprise, research institutions and government," said Andrew Muller, CEO of Ionize.
"For Australia to continue to be at the forefront of global innovation in cyber security, we need to collaborate across our industry and importantly with academia; advancing technological solutions is driven by data, analysis and lessons learned”.
The company stated that Project DFNDR is an integrated managed security service with cyber threat intelligence sharing, delivering proactive and adaptive cyber defences, creating an effective measure to understand the cyber threat environment for an organisation.
“The ability to predict, prevent and identify cyber threats attempting to exploit networks is a valuable resource and academia and research have crucial roles to play in attaining this," said Dr Abu Barkat Ullah, Associate Professor Information Technology and Systems at the University of Canberra.
"Through our analysis and research of the telemetry provided by companies participating in Project DFNDR, researchers will have access to a significant data lake to support the development of an adaptive cyber security solution.”
Prioritisation for participation in the project will be given to companies operating within or delivering services to defence and critical infrastructure industries. As part of the project, companies that choose to participate will incur no costs during proof of concept, expected to take between 12 – 15 months.