CYCLOPES: five years of building a European cybercrime community

After five years of cooperation, exchange and practical work across Europe, CYCLOPES is finally closed. For the Polish Platform for Homeland Security, as project coordinator, this is more than the formal end of an EU-funded initiative. It is a moment to look back on what it takes to build a European community around one of today’s most demanding and fast-changing security challenges: the fight against cybercrime.

Building a network around practitioners’ needs

From the outset, CYCLOPES was designed as more than a project delivering a series of activities. Its ambition was to support law enforcement agencies by connecting operational needs with research, innovation, training and standardisation, while creating a space in which practitioners, researchers, industry representatives and institutional actors could engage in a meaningful way.

In a field as complex and dynamic as cybercrime, that kind of connection matters. Effective responses depend not only on tools and technologies, but also on the ability to exchange knowledge, identify needs, compare approaches and build trusted relationships across borders and disciplines.

For the Polish Platform for Homeland Security (PPHS), coordinating CYCLOPES meant helping to create the conditions for that cooperation to happen. Over 60 months, the project brought together a broad and active community, while also working closely with organisations and networks that play an important role in the wider European ecosystem, including EACTDA, ECTEG, Europol’s Innovation Lab and the European Judicial Cybercrime Network. CYCLOPES was never meant to operate in isolation, but to contribute to a broader landscape of actors working to strengthen Europe’s capacity to prevent, investigate and respond to cybercrime.

These figures show not only the scale of the project, but also the consistency of its engagement model. Through recurring workshops, hands-on exercises and continuous exchange, CYCLOPES developed from an initial network into a more active and collaborative community.

From participation to practical collaboration

One of the project’s most important achievements was the shift from connection to collaboration. Over time, participation was shaped not only by formal project activities, but by the practical value members found in being part of the network.

Practitioners benefited from CYCLOPES in concrete ways. The project created opportunities to compare operational experiences, identify capability gaps, discuss emerging threats, explore new investigative approaches and gain access to tools and resources that might otherwise have remained out of reach. Participation also helped strengthen cross-border cooperation, supported problem-solving through peer exchange and, in some cases, contributed to the uptake of new tools, methodologies and best practices within practitioners’ own organisations.

Members also repeatedly highlighted the importance of meeting in person. Compared with video conferences, face-to-face exchanges created stronger conditions for building trust, holding constructive discussions and sharing experience more openly. They also helped relationships become more informal in a positive sense, which in turn supported collaboration, encouraged people to speak up and made participants feel listened to and valued. The diversity of expertise within the network was another recurring strength, giving members access to broader perspectives and more useful feedback.

The value of the network is perhaps best illustrated by the experiences shared by its members:

This practical orientation was reflected in the thematic range of the project. Across five years, CYCLOPES addressed a broad set of issues relevant to the changing cybercrime landscape, including digital forensics, OSINT and cyber intelligence, cryptocurrency investigations, cloud services, the Internet of Things, ransomware and crime-as-a-service, as well as strategic readiness and resilience for law enforcement agencies. CSA investigations also formed part of this wider engagement with operationally relevant cybercrime challenges.

The project’s formats evolved as the network matured. Workshops became more focused, webinars more specialised and events more interactive. The Joint Live Exercises played a particularly important role, giving participants the opportunity to test and evaluate tools, methods and collaborative approaches in practical, scenario-based settings. This helped move the project beyond high-level discussion and into a space where knowledge could be translated into operational insight.

Topics and outputs

CYCLOPES also produced a substantial body of material designed to support practitioners, researchers and innovation actors alike. One of its most tangible results is the CYCLOPES Tools Catalogue — an Excel-based repository gathering nearly 600 solutions, including commercial products, open-source tools and prototypes from EU-funded research projects, across areas such as digital forensics, OSINT, threat intelligence, cryptocurrencies and the dark web.

Key outputs also included:

• 15 analytical reports examining LEA capabilities, gaps and operational requirements
• 5 public reports for industry and academia
• 5 technical reports on stakeholder-specific community needs
• 5 foresight reports on future challenges, including the Dark Web and Quantum Computing
• 5 yearly research, innovation and market watch reports
• 5 policy papers
• recommendations on standardisation and innovation uptake

Together, these outputs show that CYCLOPES did not stop at identifying needs. It worked to turn practitioner engagement into structured knowledge, practical reference material and clearer pathways for cooperation and innovation. Some of the outputs are public, you can find them on the project website: public deliverables.

What the project meant for PPHS

The strength of CYCLOPES also lay in the consortium itself. PPHS coordinated the project, but its progress depended on the commitment and complementary expertise of the partners involved. Together, the consortium combined operational insight, technical knowledge, research capacity and communication reach in a way that reflected the complexity of the cybercrime field itself.

For PPHS, coordinating CYCLOPES was an especially important experience. It required continuity, relationship-building and a sustained effort to keep the project focused on practitioners’ needs throughout a period of rapid technological change and evolving operational demands.

As Rashel Talukder, Managing Director of PPHS, puts it:

A project closed, a community retained

In the initiative’s final year, the emphasis shifted towards consolidation. Rather than opening entirely new directions, CYCLOPES focused on reinforcing what had already been built: deepening relationships, maintaining the quality and relevance of engagement and strengthening the collaboration mechanisms developed over time.

The Community Event in Malta offered a natural moment for that reflection. As the final in-person meeting of the project period, it brought together many of the themes that had defined CYCLOPES from the beginning: practical engagement, knowledge exchange, cross-border cooperation and the value of bringing different parts of the European cybercrime community into one conversation.

As CYCLOPES formally concludes, the project leaves behind far more than a record of activities. It leaves a body of knowledge, a set of practical outputs and a community that has shown the value of structured cooperation in addressing cybercrime-related challenges. For PPHS, it has also been an important milestone — one that reflects both the responsibility of coordination and the value of helping to build connections that matter.

Those who would like to explore the project in more detail can visit the CYCLOPES website, where its activities and outputs are presented more fully. For now, this initiative stands as a strong example of what sustained European cooperation can achieve when it remains focused on real needs, practical exchange and the people working every day to respond to cybercrime.

PPHS's CYCLOPES team:

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