Project Melissa

For many organisations the current greatest business risk is cyber threats. Digital attacks on a company’s infrastructure can potentially jeopardise a company’s business continuity and damage organisations and natural persons in the ecosystem surrounding the attacked company. 

At the moment, the cyber attacks with the greatest impact on organisations are ransomware attacks. Cyber criminals use ‘ransomware’ to encrypt the systems of organisations, often also stealing their data and threatening to publish them. Only after payment of ransom, the systems are realeased and the threat of publication of the stolen data has been bought off. 

In response to this threat, a partnership has been established with the purpose of making and keeping the Netherlands unattractive to ransomware attacks: “Project Melissa”. 

The public-private partnership Project Melissa consists of the Dutch Public Prosecution Service, the police, the National Cyber Security Centrum (NCSC), Cyberveilig Nederland and several private cybersecurity companies: Computest Security, Data Expert, Deloitte, ESET, Eye Security, Fox-IT, Kennedy Van der Laan, NFIR, Northwave, PWC Nederland, Responders, Tesorion and Trellix.

The partners in Project Melissa share information on a structural basis, exchange topical developments more frequently and discuss trends. In October 2023 their collaboration was officially consolidated in a covenant that sets out the legal, organisational and technical conditions of the partnership. 

The collaboration in Project Melissa that began already in 2021 has produced several successful operations, such as Deadbolt, Genesis Market, Qakbot, Lockbit and Cactus. 

In addition, knowledge products are being developed (in Dutch) to share the expertise and knowledge gained by the specialists in the partnership with a broader public: 

• Whitepaper Ransomware
• Whitepaper Data-exfiltratie bij een ransomware-aanval
• Best practice Secundair Slachtofferschap
• Jaarbeeld Ransomware 2023
• Jaarbeeld Ransomware 2024

It was agreed to evaluate the principles of the collaboration to find out whether they work in practice. This evaluation was performed by Leiden University. The positive outcomes of this evaluation, which can be read here in Dutch and here in English, also offer building blocks for other collaborations on the sharing of information in the cybersecurity domain. 

Would you like to know more about Project Melissa? Please contact Rosalie Brand or Liesbeth Holterman of Cyberveilig Nederland (info@cyberveilignederland.nl)