Preservation and strengthening Dutch Cybersecurity Capacity

On behalf ot the cybersecurity community, Herbert Bos, Michel van Eeten and Bart Jacobs give a clear signal. They wrote an emergency plan to save cybersecurity research and innovation in the Netherlands.

The lack of Dutch financing has great risks: the needed education capacity for cybersecurity experts remains inadequate, and scientists can even leave the Netherlands to work somewhere else, where there are better circumstances. These alarm bells are sounded by the broader academic community who deal with cybersecurity. 

Support from outside the academic world is asked and we as CIO Platform Nederland have decided to support this emergency plan. We endorse the call that more structural investments in cybersecurity research and higher education are necessary. Strenghtening cybersecurity research and higher education is necessary for continuing a knowledge base with enough critical mass, for solving the shortage of teachers and for delivering more experts to the Dutch society. 

In the emergency plan three instruments are suggested to make sure the Netherlands has her own position at the highest knowledge level, and keeps this position: 
1. A competition for promotion routes and postdocs for the purpose of researchers with temporary  contracts;
2. A focused support of fixed staff, among which assistent professors, to build strong research groups;
3. The formation of a 'pool' of cybersecurity experts, to circulate academic and operational knowledge between knowledge institutions, government and companies. 

You can read the complete emergency plan on the website of dcypher. You can also find a list of supporters and an overview of university groups in cybersecurity here.