2025/37 Weekly Update from the EU ISAC for Cities & Regions: Seasons Greetings / Next Weekly Call Jan 9th / Small Christmas Present! / Update on the European Council of ISACs / OpenSSAM Trending Terms for the Day
** For Back Issues see https://isac4cities.eu/blog **
The City ISAC (I4C+) is an Information and Analysis Centre whose members are IT and cyber security decision makers exchanging knowledge to improve their cities and collective cyber resilience. I4C+ is a Special Interest Group (SIG) hosted by Major Cities Europe (MCE). Dr. Oliver Schwabe is a member of MCE and in his function Chair of the ISAC for Cities Plus (I4C+). He is the person in charge of this effort on behalf of MCE and the responsible contact person. I4C+ is recognized by the European Agency for Cybersecurity ENISA. See https://isac4cities.eu/.
** Next Weekly Call is Friday Jan 9th 9 am – 10 am CET **
Discussion Summary
Hi everyone, friends from Bulgaria, Italy and Ireland joined for our last casual chat that year as we now head into the Holiday Season. Wishing everyone a quiet few weeks and may the threat actors also take a break! 2025 was a lot about learning to operate supporting solutions like ENISA OpenSSAM, the ENISA & X-Isac MISPs, our AI agent “Barista” at Mistral, and various CTI sources – we will take that learning forward with some pilots in the coming year and perhaps, perhaps we will find ourselves mature enough to actually move beyond pilots after that.
One colleague share a small Christmas present for us all – see https://www.hagglezon.com/ for a place to check where your desired Amazon product is being offered cheapest in the EU – thanks!
Small update from the European Council of ISACs as well – lots of time spent the last weeks in a discussion on future governance, charter, value proposition etc. Remember this is the evolving ISAC of ISACs association where we can jointly create value for the various ISAC members. Current participants are: Global (Automotive, Aviation, Financial Services, Health, Retail & Hospitality, Space) & EU Controlled (EUROCONTROL/CYBERG, Maritime, Energy, Financial Services, Rail, Metrolines & Trains, Telecommunications, Top Level Domains). In 2026 we should also be able to launch the first x-ISAC collaborations ourselves. There are huge collaboration opportunities here and we will need to become a lot clearer on the specific use cases moving forward -> one clear opportunity is joining in CTI sharing via the ENISA or X-Isac MISPs. One specifically interesting conversation here relates to the difference of being a EUROPEAN groups versus a European UNION group – we are evolving more into the former which makes sense since cyber knows no geographical boundaries, while we need to ensure remaining aligned to the direction of travel for the union itself since most of our members ISACs are located in this geography and are subject to its laws (i.e. NIS2).
OpenSSAM trending terms for today below –
Before I forget, please note that our colleague Paolo Boscolo has a new email p.boscolo@majorcities.eu since retiring from Prato – congratulations and looking forward to his continuous support via our hosting organisation https://majorcities.eu/.
Wishing you all a great Holiday Season and start to 2026!
Cheers
Oliver
| ISAC Services (Member Funded) |
We have published our services at Services Offered – EU ISAC for Cities (isac4cities.eu). Please do review and consider reaching out to include such in your activities and budgets.
Note that emerging new services are related to managing the MISP platform (and onboarding) plus Barista.
Please remember you can reach the whole group via city-isac-i4c-tlpwhite@majorcities.eu. A dedicated group for those cities signing the NDAs is available separately.
Also note our LinkedIn organisational page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/eu-city-information-sharing-and-analysis-center-isac/ and our discussion group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12773643/. Do follow us / join.
Join our weekly Friday morning coffee chats from 9am-10am CET – feel free to come in your pyjamas. Let me know if you are missing an invite and I will send.
Thank you for the support, your City ISAC I4C+ Team.
Cheers and ever onwards
Oliver
Innovating our Future… Together
Chair City ISAC I4C+ / Dr. Oliver Schwabe.
Email: oliver.schwabe@isac4cities.eu Mobile: +49 (0) 1709053671. Web: https://i4c.isacs.eu/ & https://www.majorcities.eu/isac-for-cities-plus/