ATHENA, a Digital Europe Project

ATHENA is a European cyber-resilience training initiative for the water sector, part of the Digital Europe Programme. It places operational technology (OT) staff, from operators and technicians to managers, in three realistic training modules.

Prevention: enter a control room during the operator’s break, through the eyes of an attacker, and spot every vulnerability that could be exploited before time runs out.

Detection: start your shift as an OT operator in the control room of a drinking-water network. Monitor the SCADA, firewall and alert screens, notice the anomaly caused by a cyberattack, gather the clues and report them to the site manager so that production can be stopped in time.

Mitigation: appointed crisis manager during a cyberattack, you coordinate the IT, OT maintenance and HR managers by phone, give instructions to the control-room operator, assess the situation with a cyber-severity matrix and take the key decisions that limit the impact.

Each module starts with a guided tutorial and ends with a debrief and a score. Available in seven languages and aligned with the EU NIS2 directive, ATHENA delivers safe, memorable and repeatable training, with results tracking, that strengthens the cyber resilience of critical infrastructure.