PRAETORIAN strategic goal is to increase the security and resilience of European Critical Infrastructures (CI), facilitating the coordinated protection of interrelated CI against combined physical and cyber threats.

The project has developed a toolset comprising: a Physical Situation Awareness system; a Cyber Situation Awareness system; a Hybrid Situation Awareness system, which includes digital twins of the infrastructure under protection; and a Coordinated Response system. This toolset aims at supporting the security managers of CIs in their decision making to anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined security threats to their own infrastructures and other interrelated CIs.

The first demonstration of the PRAETORIAN platform took place in the Zagreb airport (Croatia), to showcase the use of the toolset in a cross-border scenario, tackling the problem of bioterrorism originating from a stolen sample in one laboratory - located in another Member State - which is then used to endanger passengers at the Zagreb airport. The partners involved in the scenario were Medical University of Graz, who operated a high security laboratory, and International Zagreb Airport Jsc., who operated the Franjo Tuđman airport in Zagreb.

During the live demo, the four PRAETORIAN systems were used by operators of both the laboratory and the airport. Focusing on a combined cyber-physical attack, several sensors (temperature, presence, sound), cameras and a C-UAV system were deployed to detect the attack at different stages and improve the situation awareness. Integration of AI-based video analytics and drone detection were two of the innovations demonstrated.

Information about cascading effects and possible consequences towards other CIs, together with possible mitigation actions, was presented to CI operators. The exercise proved the usability of a system that enhances the response capability of these operators, as well as improves the communication mechanisms among assets and CI services.

Around 100 people, 40 of them in the Zagreb airport premises and more than 60 remotely, attended this event with live demonstration conducted by project partners.