A team from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, coordinated by Prof. Stefano Zanero and Prof. Michele Carminati, in partnership with Università Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, has been selected for a 1 million euro grant as part of the Google.org Impact Challenge ‘Tech for Social Good’, an initiative sponsored by the Italian National Cybersecurity Agency and aimed to foster projects that use Artificial Intelligence for fighting against cyber-attacks.

The project assumes that IT security is a systemic problem and requires specialised and expensive knowledge that many of Italy's 3.6 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) cannot afford or have no equal access to. The Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano and Università Campus Bio-Medico of Rome will develop an AI-based app that can identify SMEs' cyber vulnerabilities, provide feedback on any gaps and suggest real-time risk mitigation strategies to enable SMEs to defend themselves against evolving digital threats.

The goal is to democratise the access to cybersecurity intelligence measures, making them easily available also to enterprises operating in traditionally underserved or disadvantaged areas. The project aims to support over 300,000 SMEs, helping to reduce cyber-attacks by 30%, and improve employee awareness of these threats by 20%.