Motivation

The digital age has brought many changes to the way we live and work. The proliferation of computational power and heterogenous data surrounding both us and any of our businesses is one of the characteristics of this age. Composing, correlating or processing such data can reveal threats, vulnerabilities or forecast incidents in several critical application contexts for our society, such as cybersecurity, cyberwarfare, anti fraude, infrastructure protection just to name the more relevant.  Issues raised in these contexts need a multidisciplinary approach to be tackled  that join together in a unique framework, legal, economic, sociological and technological aspects. Understanding regulatory aspects, having domain experts and evaluating socio-economic impacts are indeed of paramount importance in any of those application contexts to provide affective answers.

Cyber intelligence is a multidisciplinary discipline that can effectively face such complex issues.  It is important to remark that cyber intelligence along the years is not constrained anymore to the military sector  but it affects more and more the public one. Also cyber intelligence is not a synonymous of cyber security, but it is a wider concept. By building cyber intelligence capabilities, frauds could be better prevented or detected and the impact of incidents can be contained. In both cases the source of threats can be understood and learnings codified into controls that can help prevent future incidents or frauds.

The motivation for building a center of Cyber Intelligence at Sapienza are:

  • Threats, frauds and incidents will increase in the future and they will become more and more complex.
  • Solutions to such problems are not standard procedures. These solutions require research in any of the involved disciplines;
  • No public administration, government department or company has - in-house - all necessary expertizes for coping with such problems;
  • Only a large University -like Sapienza - is be able to form a group of premierships experts that can cover all expertizes needed.