FUNDACION APWG, EUROPEAN UNION FOUNDATION

Their core work

APWG EU Foundation is the European arm of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a global industry coalition that tracks and fights cybercrime, phishing, and internet fraud. In H2020 projects, they contributed domain expertise in cybercrime ecosystems, criminal data sharing, and the policy landscape around digital evidence admissibility. Their core value to research consortia is bridging the gap between technical security solutions and real-world law enforcement needs — they know how cybercrime actually works in practice. They bring practitioner networks (police, prosecutors, incident responders) that academic or tech-only partners typically lack.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 project (2017–2018), APWG EU focused on the policy and certification side of cybersecurity — digital trust frameworks and citizen rights protection in digital Europe. By their second project (2019–2022), the focus sharpened considerably toward operational cybercrime investigation: lawful evidence collection, blockchain-based evidence integrity, and trusted execution environments for forensic platforms. This reflects a shift from broad digital security policy toward concrete tools and methods for law enforcement use of digital evidence.

APWG EU is moving deeper into the law enforcement technology space — future collaborations around digital evidence platforms, cybercrime data sharing, or police-facing security tools are a natural fit.

How they like to work

APWG EU has participated only as a consortium partner — never as coordinator — across both projects, suggesting they prefer contributing specialist expertise rather than managing full projects. Despite only two projects, they engaged with 28 distinct partners across 13 countries, which indicates active and broad consortium involvement rather than a narrow recurring-partner pattern. For a consortium builder, they are a specialist node: valuable for their practitioner networks and cybercrime domain knowledge, not for administrative leadership.

APWG EU has built a surprisingly wide network from just two projects — 28 partners across 13 countries. No strong geographic concentration is evident from the data, consistent with APWG's global-coalition character.

What sets them apart

APWG is not a research institution — it is a practitioner-led industry body that tracks cybercrime at scale and maintains relationships with law enforcement, financial institutions, and incident response teams across dozens of countries. This makes them rare in H2020 consortia: an organization that can validate whether a technical solution actually maps to how cybercrime is committed and investigated in the real world. For any project in digital evidence, cybercrime, or internet fraud prevention, their participation signals credibility with law enforcement end-users.

Highlights from their portfolio

• LOCARD
  The largest and most technically ambitious of their two projects, LOCARD tackled the hard problem of building a legally defensible digital evidence platform using blockchain and trusted execution environments — directly applicable to EU-wide law enforcement cooperation.
• TRUESSEC.EU
  An early-stage coordination action that positioned APWG EU at the intersection of security certification and fundamental digital rights, demonstrating their policy influence alongside technical work.