2026/1 Weekly Update from the EU ISAC for Cities & Regions: Happy New Year! / Contextualisation of AI discussions critical / Short vendor interviews on Fridays? / Public Version of Barista AI Released / 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/.
Discussion Summary
Hi everyone, friends from Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy and Ireland (plus our friends from the Rail ISAC) joined for our first call this year – Happy New Year by the way! No-one seemed to have had a major cyber challenge over the holidays which is goodness of course.
Conversation went across a wide variety of topics as usual, although the main theme seemed to be the way we are using AI to help ourselves in daily business and the importance of human validation of what AI is telling us. One colleague using a paid version of ChatGPT that is learning quickly to understand the direction of questions being asked (the advantage of generative AI of course), although the colleague did mention that the true magic is probably when the solution is on-prem and can directly access data from the internal context (i.e. SIEMs, asset data etc). Overall though he mentioned it was critical to understand how to optimise responses to the specific environments – something we have continuously seen in our experimenting last year as well. This optimisation also requires significant context knowledge by the operator of the conversation to continuously fine-tune based on experiences (especially when it comes to integrative aspects, since a solution for a specific asset may well not be a solution for the context that asset is integrated with! -> something less experiences colleagues often seem to overlook).
We also discussed how one colleague city is using Darktrace with its “pattern of life” anomaly detection approach – interesting! It also triggered the idea that we could invite them (and perhaps other interesting solution representatives) for a short presentation on a Friday morning call and then decide whether it might be worth pulling together a wider webinar. Not supposed to be a “sales event” for the vendor, more an “awareness-building” conversation for us. Most of course are contacted by vendors regularly, so if you come across an interesting one, do let us know and we can invite them in to a Friday session (or ad-hoc short call) to understand whether their approach might be interesting to a wider audience.
Note, we have just released a simple public version of our AI agent Barista available on our website https://isac4cities.eu/ via the small bubble with “…” at the bottom right.
You may want to review and ask Barista, “Who are you?” and then “What are your hard limitations?” Remember that in the background we have configured a very specific “personality” for Barista to ensure that responses are inline with our needs. Barista is powered by the free (pretrained) AI engine interface of https://meowapps.com/ (most recently updated June 2024 / temperature: 0.8 max tokens 4096) and is configured to be driven by Mistral Medium (not making API calls for discussions though) (default setting temperature: 0.7 max_tokens: 2048 top_p: 1) -> as we mature in this space the Mistral AI agent will evolve into the advanced Barista without the limitations of the public one -> important to remember though is that any advanced usage of AI models automatically triggers AI model provider costs (“tokens”), plus team member usage licences (plus various integrations) and we will need to learn how to fund this / manage costs within funding boundaries. Advanced usage will be unavoidable since we need to connect up to MISPs, internal data repositories, pre-configured sandbox environments for malware testing etc etc via APIs. Lots of opportunities ahead as we explore use cases and what is truly needed (including which AI engines out there actually meet our needs) -> this will enable us to define our roadmap. If you are able to sponsor the costs a little, please do let us know.
FYI as well we looked at potentially linking up with the US based “Coalition of City CISOs” (https://cityciso.org/) to which we were introduced by friends in the US. Stay tuned as we explore how to perhaps collaborate for joint advantage.
OpenSSAM trending terms for today below – interesting to see “CES 2026” standing out -> if you are unsure what this is, you can always ask Barista 😊
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/