Beyond the NIS Directive with its focus on incident reporting and threat information sharing, there are a number of further activities at EU level to tackle the rising number of cybersecurity incidents. On 23 June 2021, the European Commission proposed a Joint Cyber Unit to bring together resources and expertise available to the EU and its Member States in order to effectively prevent, deter and respond to mass cyber incidents and crises. The initiative recognises that cybersecurity communities, including civilian, law enforcement, diplomatic and cyber defence communities, as well as private sector parties, too often operate separately. The Joint Cyber Unit introduces a virtual and physical cooperation platform to strengthen cooperation among EU institutions, agencies, bodies and the authorities in the Member States (e.g. civilian communities, law-enforcement, diplomatic and cyber defence authorities). The Unit will be built gradually in four steps with the operationalisation of the Unit completed by 31 December 2022 and the whole process being completed by June 2023.
The poster on the Joint Cyber Unit has been created by Pietro Dunn as part of the course “Transnational Regulation of the Internet” (Doctoral School of Law, University of Luxembourg).