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Two projects from Â鶹ӰԺ Leicester (Â鶹ӰԺ) have won funding from a programme designed to support commercialisation of cyber security research.

Philleted Phish and Telehealth CybrShield are being supported by the Cyber Security Academic Start-Up Accelerator (Cyber ASAP) which is funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to help researchers turn ideas into businesses, and develop their entrepreneurial skills.




Cyber ASAP creates a pipeline to commercialise innovation, moving research into marketable technologies, products and services. Both Â鶹ӰԺ projects align with the UK Government’s aims to boost cyber security protection.

Philleted Phish aims to help prevent people falling victims to scams and online frauds by spotting and stopping phishing emails, a type of cyber attacks that targets people through their emails. People can mistakenly think they are receiving genuine communications and be tricked into clicking links which allow malware or divulging private information.

Cyber attacks cost UK businesses £37 billion a year – and around 90 per cent of these attacks start with a phishing email. Dr Iryna Yevseyeva, Professor Eerke Boiten, Dr Viktor Basto-Fernandes, part-time lecturer at Â鶹ӰԺ, and PhD student Trevor Wood are developing proof-of-concept software for smaller businesses and individuals.  Current commercial solutions are available but cannot be run on laptops and are designed for large scale businesses.

The Philleted Phish team said: “This is a very exciting opportunity. It has the potential to reduce the amount of successful cyber-attacks on small businesses, which will in turn increase their profitability and reduce the flow of funds to organised crime. Domestic users will be able use the service too, keeping them, and their children, safer online.”

The Telehealth CybrShield team are working to protect medical data and make it more secure, using complex cryptography and AI algorithms to scramble online information making it harder for cyber attackers to access.

Telehealth CyberShield device tackles two main issues: financial losses and cyberattacks in the healthcare sector. The team, of Dr Richard Smith, Dr Mujeeb Rehman, Dr Arslan Shafique and Dr Muhammad Kazim, plan to work with healthcare providers to develop it commercially.

Dr Smith said: “Telehealth Cybrshield provides an innovative, highly-efficient and secure device for protecting medical data. It provides real-time, robust security by utilizing a future-proof, low computational complexity approach for healthcare data. It mitigates cyber threats by ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of the data it protects and seamlessly integrates with existing data processing devices.”

Nationally the DCMS funding has helped projects to leverage £12,382,895 in additional investment which includes venture capital and angel investment.