The new Alentejo Cybersecurity Competence Center (CCCA) is the result of a consortium that brings together the polytechnic institutes of Beja (IPBeja) and Portalegre (IPP) and the University of Évora (UÉ).

According to one of the coordinators of the initiative, Rui Silva, from IPBeja, this new center "will certainly be very important for the entire region".

The CCCA will have three hubs -- at IPBeja, IPP and UÉ --, with the aim of promoting cybersecurity in public administration organizations and in companies in the region, he explained.

The project will be presented publicly, this Wednesday, at 3 pm, in Beja, within the scope of the 14th edition of SimSic -- Symposium on Computer Security and Cybercrime, which will take place in the city until Thursday.

According to Rui Silva, a professor at IPBeja, the new CCCA is funded by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), within the scope of an application approved for the "C-Networks" competition, from the National Cybersecurity Center.

The objective is "to provide free support to 194 entities until March 2026", revealed Rui Silva, explaining that "the criteria for selecting the entities to be supported are, on the one hand, their relevance to the region and, on the other hand, those who have not yet benefited from support for cybersecurity or information security".

The business clusters and intermunicipal communities of the region "are the privileged partners" of the center, which will provide support in areas such as cooperation and sharing, innovation, human capacity building or organizational capacity building.

"I think this will be the most important, because there are international recommendations that companies and organizations do not follow and this project will allow, free of charge, to make companies and organizations aware of their status in the face of these recommendations", stressed Rui Silva.

In practical terms, he continued, the center will "produce compliance verification and risk analysis reports, so that companies and entities can continue with what their needs are to mitigate the problems".

"We will not do anything operational, only produce reports that serve as support for the work" that the entities will have to do, he stressed.

The 14th SimSic, organized by the UbiNet Laboratory of IPBeja, will take place in the common services building of that polytechnic institute and has the theme "Artificial Intelligence and CyberIntelligence".

According to Rui Silva, from the organization of the event, this theme will be approached "from the perspectives of national sovereignty, information technologies, law and the evolution of humanity".

The symposium program also includes lectures by several Portuguese and foreign experts, 'workshops', challenges, the full cybercrime exercise called "Casa do Crime" and a wine tasting.

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