Project Melissa
At the end of 2023, the FD headlined "Project 'Melissa' Rolls Up First Hacker Group" and the newspaper wrote: "A Dutch group of cyber experts from government and business has played an important role in taking down part of Qakbot." It involved 700,000 infected computers.
The same Project Melissa recently presented in collaboration with NCSC the Ransomware Annual Review for 2023. This Annual Review was made possible thanks to the input of parties such as Computest, Data Expert, Deloitte, Fox-IT, Kennedy Van der Laan N.V., NFIR, Northwave, Tesorion, Trellix and the Dutch Police.
SecureNed
Underlying this annual review and the first structural information sharing within Project Melissa is the NCSC's SecureNed platform. Thanks to the platform, NCSC, Cyberveilig Nederland, the police and the Public Prosecution Service were able to map out the nature of the ransomware threat in the Netherlands. Bringing this information together in an annual review was a first and led to new insights into the extent of this problem. At an earlier stage, SecureNed also helped, among other things, to identify increased cyber risks related to the war in Ukraine.
Shared insights
SecureNed is a relatively young partnership of NCSC aimed at sharing information about cyber threats and incidents. Based on the insights shared, participants can take measures to prevent or limit damage. It works according to the principles of privacy-by-design: parties can share information openly, but also in a protected manner - with strong guarantees of confidentiality - if necessary.
Scope and further development
SecureNed currently has about 100 participants. With the broadening scope as a result of the NIS2 directive, the NCSC expects that SecureNed will continue to play an important role in exchanging information for this larger target group. As previously shown in the Cyclotron exploration, SecureNed, together with the National Detection Network (NDN) and a number of other initiatives, forms an important building block in a rapidly developing landscape for secure, faster and more targeted sharing of information in a public-private context. For this reason, the further development of SecureNed is still ongoing. This further development is partly facilitated by Cyclotron, where parties are brought together, legal frameworks and preconditions are monitored, and technology and functionality are safeguarded.
Roseman Labs
Roseman Labs is a deep-tech company revolutionising the possibilities of encrypted computing. SecureNed uses the Roseman Labs data platform.
With Roseman Labs you can conveniently and safely analyze complex phenomena, such as cyber threat data, across a wide ecosystem. The platform acts as the orchestrator of this data ecosystem with convenient tools to request and analyze data. It also offers participants the ability to securely submit data and approve analyses on combined data, all with the assurance that information is processed under encryption.
Generate new insights on sensitive data with Roseman Labs’ secure Multi-Party Computation technology. Want to find out how your organization can do that? Contact us using the form below.
