The evolving landscape of global security has shifted away from the traditional dynamics of superpower confrontation towards a more complex interaction involving both state and non-state actors. The information revolution driven by technologies and the use of Internet has contributed to the change of the way decision-making process are made, and how they nowadays relay on a computer-based rationale-making procedure. Internet along with digital platforms and social networks have envisaged a new domain through which influence collective perceptions, holding a significant strategic importance in military operations. The increasing dependence on Information Technology (IT) has introduced both opportunities and vulnerabilities, such as the dissemination of disinformation campaigns via the Internet. This essential factor of the switch of the evolution of societal relationships, shows the importance of the psychological domain in cyber operations, particularly in the military field. Technologies are the main way through which psychological operations are used and how they can influence the decision-making processes of the users involved in Information Warfare (IW). The aim of this study is to analyse how technology enablers can provide defensive countermeasures for the decision-making capabilities of a user engaged in IW and Psychological Operations (PSYOPS). It is explored a set of technical enablers that can aid to mitigate the downside effects of IW targeted against individuals engaged in disinformation campaigns and to support their decision-making processes. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this research is the proposal of defensive mechanisms to diminish the likelihood of success of an adversarial attack based on the exploitation of the psychological domain.

In today’s dynamic and complex warfare landscape, characterized by the convergence of traditional and emerging threats, the significance of cybersecurity in shaping modern conflicts cannot be overstated. Such trend presents a challenging paradigm shift in how military organizations approach mosaic warfare in the digital age since new attack vectors and targets appear in their landscapes. In this vein, it is pivotal for military teams to have a clear and concise roadmap for cybersecurity incidents linked to potential mosaic warfare. This manuscript introduces a novel approach to bolstering mosaic warfare strategies by integrating an advanced Knowledge Representation and Reasoning system and a tailored ontology. Motivated by the critical role of cybersecurity in contemporary warfare, the proposed system aims to enhance situational awareness, decision-making capabilities, and operational effectiveness in the face of evolving cyber threats. In this sense, this manuscript entails a new ontology that not only covers the cybersecurity realm but also introduces key concepts related to strategic and operational military levels at the same time. The ad-hoc ontology is also compared against other well-known ones, such as MITRE, NATO, or UCO approaches and manifests a significant performance by employing standardized quality metrics for ontologies. Lastly, a realistic mosaic warfare scenario is contextualized to demonstrate the deployment of the proposed system and how it can properly represent all information gathered from heterogeneous data sources.

As cyber threats continue to evolve, the need for highly skilled cyber defence operators becomes increasingly critical. In this work, we aim to provide a multidisciplinary exploration into the current educational landscape, focusing on the following pivotal areas: cyber defence educational initiatives, digital skills, technological enablers, and ethical considerations. First, we present the current landscape of cyber defence educational initiatives. Then, we examine the required digital skills, virtual reality and augmented reality initiatives for immersive learning experiences and delve into the advantages of game-based learning for skill acquisition in order to finally provide a holistic evaluation of the complexities involved in cyber defence training. We underscore the importance of standardising training modules tailored to diverse roles within cyber defence. The discussion emphasises the need for ethical and legal guidelines, especially concerning privacy and bias in AI-driven educational tools. Finally, we highlight the importance of dynamic curricula that include technical, legal, and soft skills, along with hands-on training through simulations to prepare operators for real-world cyber threats. This work will serve as a foundation for academics, industry professionals, and policy-makers interested in elevating the standards and effectiveness of cyber defence training suggesting ideas for more specialised, adaptable, and ethically responsible programs.

Psychological warfare and hybrid threats are currently one of the greatest risks to the stability of democratic systems, as well as are used to exploit the psychological vulnerability of individuals. Together with the use of disinformation and technologies, cognitive biases of individuals in a population are susceptible to being exploited and manipulated by an external actor in order to alter their behaviour, beliefs and decision-making to achieve their strategic goals. As pointed by NATO, the human mind becomes the battlefield in cognitive warfare, targeting not only individuals but also group behaviours in favor of an adversary’s objectives. The aim of this research is therefore the revision of cognitive warfare and hybrid threats definitions to draw a set of countermeasures intended to mitigate their effects. Even when cognitive warfare has been widely covered by the different miliary doctrines since early times, its implications in modern warfare scenarios are constantly evolving so that requiring a context-aware analysis as the main driver to underpin possible countermeasures from the governmental and political perspectives, as presented in this work. The analysis explores the cognitive impact and scope of psychological warfare on a national scale, as well as at the individual level within a context of proliferating disinformation, technologies, and manipulation.

A methodology for tracking and analysing the needs for standardization and certification harmonization thorough the project life cycle will be defined and enforced, which will allow the early identification of issues related to the conceptualization, design, implementation, integration and deployment of tools for support the EU disaster resiliency; which will be facilitated by a complete consultation strategy to the different stakeholders that are expected to act at each capability development phase, ranging from providers to end users. On these grounds H2020-VALKYRIES will develop, integrate and demonstrate capabilities for enabling immediate and coordinated emergency response including search and rescue, security and health, in scenarios of natural/provoked catastrophes with multiple victims, with special application in cases in which several regions or countries are affected and hence greater interoperability being required. H2020-VALKYRIES will propose both design and development of a modular, interoperable, scalable and secure-oriented reference integration, called SIGRUN, which will allow the integration between legacy solutions and new technologies in a framework of harmonized solutions. SIGRUN will be able to deploy services and dynamically adapt its behaviour, as the emergency requires it. A series of demonstration scenarios will be developed placing an emphasis on cross-border and cross-sectorial BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight) scenarios, where the usual communications infrastructure could have been damaged, and emergency response teams are deployed without an accurate view of the operation environment.

As the military sector digitalizes, there is a broader need for distributed computation and storage solutions deployable at the operational edge, which pose the potential of minimizing the conventional information exchanges by among others, proved enhancements in terms of latency and communication cost. The state of the art refers to multiple applications of edge computing with a vast value on tactical clouds, with may range from enabling optimized transmissions, to federated machine learning and data fusion services. However, very few of them explore the risks they entail in terms of sustainability, were an inappropriate orchestration of the edge capabilities may for example, mistakenly or maliciously deplete the energy sources that feed their supportive infrastructure, or cause electromagnetic alterations exploitable by electronic warfare actuations. In order to facilitate their understanding and contribute to their mitigation, this paper delves into the problematic inherent in Tactical Denial of Sustainability (TDoS) against tactical clouds. The conducted research introduces a framework to prevent TDoS and if required, identify their symptoms and mitigate their damage. The proposal is settled on the Self-Organizing Network (SON) paradigm and its Self-Protection (SP) applications, which benefits of their synergy with the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loop towards dynamically and adaptively triggering proportional reactions.

As the digitalization of the military conflicts increases, gaining decision superiority become the key to enhance the likelihood of success, which among others is enabled by bringing to the tactical edge emerging ICT paradigms like advanced data fusion, Artificial Intelligence, distributed computation or end-to-trust. Based on them, Tactical Clouds will allow the provisioning of C3 services for enhancing the development of the tactical pillars of modern join military operations, like Intelligence, Surveillance, Situational Awareness, or support to decision-making. But the adoption of new technological enablers bring novel and unexplored challenges that when no remediated, may jeopardize the operability of the digital tactical assets, being the cyber defence an essential cornerstone for their safeguarding. In these grounds, the main purpose of the conducted research is to review and analyze the denial of sustainability problem on tactical combat clouds; which entails a rara avis topic on the existing bibliography among other due to the novelty, secrecy and low level of technological maturity on their related digital enablers. The research presents and scoping action that developed the following secondary objectives: 1) to frame the denial of sustainability threats on the emerging Tactical Cloud paradigm; 2) to formalize the Tactical Denial of Sustainability (TDoS) concept; 3) to introduce the phasing, potential attack surfaces, terrains and impact of TDoS attacks; 4) to illustrate heterogeneous CONOPS that facilitate the understanding of TDoS; and 5) to raise and encourage the development of further research topics and actions.

The rapid evolution of the emerging communication landscape prompted the rise of never seen before threats, in this way encouraging the development of more effective Network-based Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) able to recognize outlying behaviors. But despite the theoretical effectiveness of the existing state-of-the-art, the in-depth review of the bibliography suggests the need for their constant adaptation to the changes in their operational environment and preventing being evaded by mimicry methods. The latest threats attempt to hide the malicious actions in a tangle of statistical features that simulate the normal use of the protected network, so they acquire a greater chance of avoiding the defensive actuators. In order to contribute to their mitigation, this paper introduces a novel intrusion detection strategy resistant against mimicry. The proposal constructs models of the network usage and from them, analyzes the binary contents of the traffic payload looking for outlying patterns that may evidence malicious contents. In contrast to most previous solutions, our research overcomes the traditional strengthening via randomization, by taking advantage of scoring the suspicious packet similarity between legitimate and previously built adversarial models. Its effectiveness was evaluated on the public datasets DARPA'99 and UCM 2011, where its ability to recognize attacks obfuscated by imitation was proven.

The forthcoming 5G operational environment entails heterogeneous and multi-dimensional ecosystems where cyber assets, digital actors and cyber-physical risks coexist. In this context, the prediction and anticipation of the attacks propagation thorough the targeted systems promises to be some of the major workhorses of the emerging self-protection capabilities. In the grounds of the Self-Organizing Network (SON) paradigm, it is expected that by taking into account proactive actuations, the decision and enforcement of the best courses of action will be enhanced. With the aim on contributing to their planning and execution, this paper introduces a novel framework for proactive self-protection on 5G environments, the description of an architectural framework able to sustain the rest of the anticipation enablers, the formalization of a knowledge representation and reasoning strategy for active cyber threat mitigation, and a prediction strategy adapted to the difficulties inherent in analyzing events on 5G scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposal has been demonstrated by proof-of-concept instantiation for anticipating the impact of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on a real communication environment.

In the last decade, crypto-ransomware evolved from a family of malicious software with scarce repercussion in the research community, to a sophisticated and highly effective intrusion method positioned in the spotlight of the main organizations for cyberdefense. Its modus operandi is characterized by fetching the assets to be blocked, their encryption, and triggering an extortion process that leads the victim to pay for the key that allows their recovery. This paper reviews the evolution of crypto-ransomware focusing on the implication of the different advances in communication technologies that empowered its popularization. In addition, a novel defensive approach based on the Self-Organizing Network paradigm and the emergent communication technologies (e.g. Software-Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, Cloud Computing, etc.) is proposed. They enhance the orchestration of smart defensive deployments that adapt to the status of the monitoring environment and facilitate the adoption of previously defined risk management policies. In this way it is possible to efficiently coordinate the efforts of sensors and actuators distributed throughout the protected environment without supervision by human operators, resulting in greater protection with increased viability

This paper reviews the Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) problem in emerging network scenarios. The performed research studied them in context of adaptive approaches grounded on self-organizing networks (SON) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In particular, two novel threats were reviewed in depth: Workload-based EDoS (W-EDoS) and Instantiation-based EDoS (I-EDoS). With the aim to contribute to their mitigation a security architecture with network-based intrusion detection capabilities is proposed. This architecture implements machine learning techniques, network behaviour prediction, adaptive thresholding methods, and productivity-based clustering for detecting entropy-based anomalies based on the observed workload (W-EDoS) or suspicious variations of the productivity observed at the virtual instances (I-EDoS). A detailed experimentation has been conducted considering different calibration parameters under different network scenarios, on which the security architecture has been assessed. The results have proven good accuracy levels, hence demonstrating the proposal effectiveness.