The City Deal Local Cyberresilience is the 22nd signed City Deal. City Deals are collaboration agreements in which cities, ministries, civil society partners and market partners work together on an equal basis. For a period of 4 years, room for experimentation will be sought and used to gain valuable insights as input for new national or local policy. Experimentation, equality and innovation are key principles of these city deals. The Local Cyberresilience City Deal is created to support efforts in decreasing the impact of cybercrime by increasing the cyberresilience of citizens and companies in cities. Numbers of cybercrime and digitalised crime have been growing over the past decades and there are no signs this form of criminality will be over soon. Moreover, due to the pandemic, more people work at home which means they are more at risk of becoming a victim to either cybercrime of digitalised crime.
Yet, many people are not aware they are at risk. Citizens and companies often think they won’t become victim to cybercrime. For some people the instalment of digital tools to protect themselves online can be a time consuming and difficult job. Therefore it is important to raise awareness and support citizens and companies to take preventive measurements. The City Deal defined four goals:
The City Deal aims to reach these goals by supporting 18 bottom-up projects that work on new innovative approaches to increase cyberesilience. The Hague’s Cyberresilient Neighbourhoods is one of these projects. It is a collaboration between the Police Unit of The Hague, the Municipality and citizens of four neighbourhoods of the city. These citizens play an active role as digital ambassador to inform their neighbours on cybercrime risks and preventive measures. They try to reach their neighbourhood networks via the sports club, community centre, owners association, supermarket or local newspapers. As digital ambassadors use their own ideas and creativity to reach their fellow residents, a diverse range of methods is applied to communicate information. This provides a lot of lessons learned for bottom-up approaches to work on cyberresilience, that can be shared with the participating parties in the City Deal.
You can view the signing here.