European Commisioner Günther Oettinger put his signature under a public-private partnership with the ECSO, the European Cyber Security Organisation. It is expected that companies involved with ECSO will at least triple the 450 million euros of initial investments, leading to a sum of at least 1.8 billion invested in cybersecurity initiatives by 2020. The EC investment is part of the research and innovation program Horizon 2020.

The public-private partnership has the goal of stimulating combined initiatives and innovations in an early stage of the R&D process. The partnership will also include members from national, regional and local public administrations, research centres and academia, with the first call for proposals set to be published in early 2017.

The EC cites recent research by PWC that states at least 80 percent of all European companies has had to deal with a cyberattack at least once in the past two years. Worldwide the number of cyberincidents climbed 38 percent in 2015. Another recent study by security company TrapX showed that cyberattacks on organisations in the health sector have grown beyond those made on the Financial or retailing industry.

TrapX also wrote that to often connected medical equipment suffers from bad security, opening it up to malware. When infected, these devices open the way for stealing health information from hospital databases, eletronic health records et cetera. According to Deloitte, many hospitals lack sufficient security measures. Out of 24 researched hospitals in 9 countries more than half use default settings to secure medical equipment.