Cybercriminals do not stop at borders, but the police who chase them usually do. The EU-funded CYCLOPES project spent five years bringing European law enforcement officers, researchers and industry around one table: it ran workshops, built a shared database of tools and helped spark a Belgian anti-phishing initiative that has already blocked around 1,600 fake websites. Here is how the network works — and at the end you can check whether you have a nose for tracking down online criminals.
A phishing campaign can be launched from one country, hosted in a second and aimed at victims in a third. The investigators, on the other hand, work within national rules, national budgets and national habits. That mismatch is the starting point of CYCLOPES (Fighting Cybercrime – Law Enforcement Practitioners’ Network), a Horizon 2020 project that ran from May 2021 to April 2026.
“Cybercrime evolves rapidly, requiring law enforcement to continuously adapt to new technologies and criminal methods,” says Rashel Talukder, managing director of the Polish Platform for Homeland Security, which coordinated the project.
The problem is not only speed. Each country has developed its own way of dealing with online crime, and that creates blind spots. “Approaches across Europe differ, so there is a danger that our attempts to combat crime will be fragmented, leading to duplication of effort and missed lessons that could be learned, therefore cooperation is needed,” Talukder explains.
CYCLOPES set out to strengthen the whole ecosystem, connecting law enforcement agencies with researchers, industry, policymakers and standardisation bodies across Europe.
Instead of starting with a wish list drawn up in an office, the team went to the people doing the actual work. It organised 15 face-to-face workshops with European law enforcement agencies to find out where their capabilities fall short.
“We wanted to hear directly from those on the ground, at the forefront of the work being done to address the threat,” Talukder says.
The workshops focused on the areas where investigators feel the pressure most:
Each topic brought officers from different countries together to compare problems and, just as importantly, the solutions they had already tried.
One of the project’s key results is an extensive database of tools and solutions already used by law enforcement agencies in Europe. The idea is simple: nobody should spend months building something a colleague abroad has already built.
“It’s like a library, really. If an authority comes across a problem, they can consult the database to see if another has already dealt with the same issue, and how,” says Talukder.
The best proof that meeting in person pays off came from a workshop in Stockholm. There, the Belgian Federal Police and the Dutch research organisation TNO exchanged knowledge on detecting phishing proactively, before scam sites can do much damage.
The conversation led to PhishNemo, a Belgian initiative that has since won an award. It has blocked around 1,600 malicious phishing websites and protected more than 120,000 potential victims. “This demonstrates how bringing together experts from different organisations and countries can generate lasting impact beyond a project’s formal objectives,” Talukder notes.
CYCLOPES did not only look at today’s threats. Over its lifetime it produced more than 100 reports, including annual foresight analyses meant to help cybercrime investigators anticipate future needs. Topics included the dark web and quantum computing, and what they could mean for the work of investigators.
The project also coordinated its activities with Europol, the European Commission’s DG HOME, EACTDA, ECTEG and EJCN.
The project has formally ended, but its community has not dissolved. The CYCLOPES Network carries on, with the Polish Platform for Homeland Security acting as its Secretariat and keeping practitioners, researchers and industry in touch.
For Talukder, the human side matters as much as the technology. “Beyond technical results, CYCLOPES demonstrated that trust, personal relationships and long-term professional networks remain fundamental for successful international cooperation against cybercrime,” he says. “We intend to do all we can to ensure that, going forward, research and innovation activities respond directly to operational requirements.”
CYCLOPES treated cross-border cybercrime as a problem of cooperation as much as technology. Fifteen workshops, a shared database of tools, over 100 reports and a network that keeps working after the funding ended all serve the same goal: letting Europe’s police learn from each other instead of reinventing the same solutions. PhishNemo shows that a single well-timed conversation between two countries can end up protecting tens of thousands of people.
5 questions · one minute
EN 
CS
DE
ES
FR
HU
IT
PL
PT
РУ
SK
TR
УК
AR
中文