EU-Wide Knowledge Transfer

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - November 9, 2025

A behind-the-scenes look at the monthly threat-intel relay that keeps fifteen time-zones awake without ever leaking PII

Every last Thursday at 15:00 CET the same ritual unfolds inside the former cooling-tower control room that now serves as the Alliance broadcast studio. The coffee is terrible, the fibre is redundant, and the clock on the wall is set to UTC so no one can claim home-field advantage. At 14:58 the stream key goes live on a Jitsi instance that runs on a sovereign cloud parked five hundred metres down the road; by 15:01 the attendee counter shows 218 unique client certificates, each signed by a national CA that is itself cross-certified with the CRA federation bundle. No passwords, no waiting room, no vendor splash screen—just a silent TLS handshake that proves you are who you claim to be and that you are allowed to hear what is about to be said. What follows is neither a sales pitch nor a threat-intel teaser; it is a raw export of the previous four weeks of telemetry, stripped of anything that could identify the victim, and enriched with context that only another SOC analyst would find useful. We call it the Knowledge Transfer Relay, and it is the closest thing the European cyber community has to a collective short-term memory.

The format is deliberately skeletal: twenty minutes of data, ten minutes of root-cause narrative, five minutes of Q&A, then everyone drops off. No recordings, no slides, no chat log—because the moment you try to archive nuance you start to lawyer it into irrelevance. Instead, each participant receives a STIX 2.1 bundle that contains the IOCs, the YARA signatures, and the detection logic in Sigma format, all signed with the Alliance’s GPG key so that downstream SIEMs can verify provenance before ingestion. The bundle is seeded through a Matrix room that self-destructs at 16:00, leaving behind nothing but a hash on an immutable ledger that runs on a Tendermint chain hosted in three counties. The architecture sounds baroque, yet it solves the one problem that has haunted every previous sharing scheme: how do you disseminate actionable intelligence without creating a secondary liability market for plaintiffs who lost data while the clock was ticking. By keeping the content ephemeral and the artefacts cryptographically sealed, we remove the incentive to sue the messenger because the messenger evaporates sixty minutes after speaking.

Content selection follows a simple escalation ladder. Any member SOC that processes an incident rated HIGH or CRITICAL according to the EU CSIRT classification matrix may nominate the case for transfer. A rotating three-person editorial board—one commercial analyst, one public-sector analyst, one independent academic—then reviews the nomination for sanitisation quality and contextual value. The board meets on Wednesday evening in an encrypted Mumble channel that requires FIDO2 attestation; a single veto kills the nomination, ensuring that no government can strong-arm sensitive breaches into the public stream. Over the past twelve months 127 nominations were submitted and 94 cleared the bar, yielding a 74 % acceptance rate that members cite as proof the filter is neither too lax nor too political. The rejected cases typically involve active law-enforcement investigations or insurers who fear reputational contagion; those incidents are still shared, but only through a separate, closed channel that requires an NDA signed in ink and verified by a notary public. The dual-path system preserves velocity for the bulk of threats while reserving a quieter lane for the edge cases that could sink a share price or prejudice a jury pool.

Language friction is dissolved by a volunteer corps of bilingual analysts who provide simultaneous interpretation in the six working languages of the CRA: English, German, French, Polish, Czech and Italian. Interpretation is streamed over a separate audio channel that lags less than 400 milliseconds, thin enough that speakers can pause for breath without stepping on the translator. The service is financed through a micro-surcharge added to every membership invoice: 0.12 € per employee per month, barely visible on a balance sheet yet sufficient to fund professional interpreters who otherwise charge corporate rates. The result is that a ten-person SOC in rural Slovakia can ask a question in Slovak and receive an answer in Slovak even though the original briefing was delivered in English, removing the final excuse for staying silent when you spot something odd traversing your network.

"Intelligence that cannot cross borders in real time is just history with better graphics."

Measurement is handled by an unobtrusive beacon embedded in the STIX bundle. When a recipient SIEM imports the JSON, the beacon fires a one-way hash of the bundle ID back to a telemetry collector that counts ingestions but never records source IP or customer name. In the last quarter we observed a 92 % ingestion rate within six hours of release, and a 67 % re-ingestion rate after seven days, suggesting that members rerun the artefacts against fresh logs at least once a week. Even more telling is the downward curve in duplicate incidents: regions that attend the relay report a 38 % reduction in follow-up tickets for the same IOC family, implying that early warning actually compresses the attack window instead of merely documenting it. Those statistics are published in aggregate form every quarter so that finance directors can see the ROI of membership in hard numbers rather than in colour-coded heat maps.

Sustainability comes from rotation, not expansion. Every six months a new trio of analysts takes over the editorial board, and every year a different region hosts the broadcast studio, ensuring that no single capital accumulates permanent influence. Next April the chair passes to Malta, whose small but highly multilingual CSIRT will add Arabic and Maltese to the interpretation roster, widening the funnel to North-African fibre landings that feed southern Europe. The Maltese government has offered the old Lascaris war rooms as a physical backdrop, a symbolic nod to the idea that knowledge transfer is a civic defence function as old as radar. When the baton moves again in autumn 2027 we will return to Anhalt-Bitterfeld, but by then the template will have run through six iterations, each one stress-tested against a slightly different legal culture, threat landscape and budget cycle. The long-term vision is not to create a permanent webinar series but to nurture a protocol so lightweight that any two regions can fire it up after a ten-minute phone call, confident that the artefacts, the language bridge and the governance guard-rails will simply work, no matter whose flag is flying outside the window.

The Cyber Resilience Alliance is a public-private partnership established 2025, led by CypSec, Validato and the County of Mansfeld-Südharz. The Alliance operates a sovereign private-cloud security stack, a shared SOC and an cyber academy, aiming to make Mansfeld-Südharz the reference site for rural cyber resilience by 2030.

Media Contact: Daria Fediay, Chief Executive Officer at CypSec - daria.fediay@cypsec.de.