As artificial intelligence transforms both cyber-attack and defence capabilities, the region's ability to maintain its position as a prime location for cybersecurity investment depends on staying ahead of an accelerating technological curve.
The answer, according to industry leaders, lies in the convergence of academic research excellence and commercial expertise. The prime example of this type of partnership is the collaboration between Rapid7 and Queen's University Belfast's Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT).
The partnership, launched through CSIT's Cyber-AI Hub, addresses fundamental challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. Cybercriminals are rapidly adopting AI to enhance their capabilities, creating what industry experts describe as an arms race between attackers and defenders.
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For Judith Millar, Director of Operations at CSIT, the collaboration represents a strategic response to a critical need.
"Northern Ireland is known for cyber security, a strong reputation as the number one location for US inward investment. But what does that look like in five years and 10 years’ time? How do we maintain that reputation and that position?" she says.
The answer lies in Cyber AI and AI security, fields that combine traditional cybersecurity expertise with advanced machine learning techniques to detect and respond to increasingly sophisticated threats.
The QUB and Rapid7 partnership leverages distinct but complementary capabilities from each organisation. Rapid7 brings domain expertise from its position as a leader in extended risk and threat detection, serving over 11,000 global customers. This includes not just technical knowledge from product development, but crucially, insights from real-world customer challenges and threat landscapes.
"Rapid7 brings our domain expertise and not just from our products but also from the customer challenges," says Damian Horner, VP Engineering at Rapid7. "CSIT brings in their research skills and the wealth of experience they have."
CSIT contributes academic rigour and research capabilities, particularly the ability to pursue long-term investigations that commercial pressures might otherwise curtail.
"The project with Rapid7 is about long-term impact and that’s where a university partner adds real value. We bring the tenacity to stick with things over time, navigating complex challenges, while our engineering team ensures we are equipped to deliver results in the short term too,” says Judith.
The partnership operates through CSIT's Cyber-AI Hub, which launched in 2023 with UK government funding as part of the New Deal for Northern Ireland. The hub includes a Doctoral Training Programme with 15 PhD candidates, Masters’ bursaries for 40 students, and involves eight industry partners in collaborative research and skills development.
The collaboration has already moved beyond theoretical research into practical product development and is currently working on its second major project, focusing on alert triage for Security Operations Centres (SOCs), a critical challenge for cybersecurity teams who must process overwhelming volumes of security alerts daily.
"If you're working on a SOC, you receive a feed of alerts regarding the infrastructure and the business assets that you're protecting. They come from a multitude of different sources and it's effectively like drinking from a fire hose," says Damian. "Some of these incoming messages and alerts you know you must take action on, but some of them don't seem relevant."
The research aims to develop AI models that can better distinguish between benign and malicious alerts, helping security teams prioritise their responses more effectively. This in turn influences Rapid7's flagship products, which apply AI-driven anomalous activity detection across multi-cloud and hybrid environments to classify and prioritise threats more rapidly and accurately.
The urgency behind this collaboration stems from the evolving threat landscape. According to the National Cyber Security Centre, cybercriminals possessing any level of sophistication will soon be able to leverage AI to significantly enhance their initial access capabilities, particularly targeting cloud services that are notoriously complex and difficult to secure.
"This is essentially an arms race," says Damian. "The ways that we're talking about using AI to speed up our engineers and to make our product better, well, attackers are doing exactly the same thing. They're making their attack products better and their methods of how they conduct their business."
This dynamic creates particular challenges for cloud security, where customers are implementing AI in diverse ways that create new attack surfaces. The complexity of these environments requires security solutions that can assess AI implementations alongside traditional infrastructure components.
Beyond research outcomes, the partnership serves as a crucial mechanism for developing Northern Ireland's cybersecurity talent pipeline. The collaboration operates on multiple levels, from PhD research through to undergraduate placements and guest lectures. Rapid7 takes Queen's placement students annually, while CSIT's PhD students regularly present at industry events such as the NI Cyber Cluster breakfast meetings.
"The team from Cyber-AI Hub, they're regularly in our offices and the learning goes both ways," says Damian. "Rapid7 benefits from the research and the team at CSIT get exposure to a commercial operation, how we build product, the decision-making that goes into that, and what's competitive in the market."
Judith Millar suggests that this has a multiplier effect. "With Rapid7 working with the CSIT team, that upscaling is two way, which is really exciting, providing real-world use cases and application for research.,"
The partnership extends this impact through quarterly review sessions that bring multiple company partners together with the CSIT team, creating opportunities for knowledge sharing across the broader cybersecurity ecosystem.
For CSIT, industry collaboration provides the pathway to commercialisation that transforms academic research into real-world applications.
"We see industry partnerships as a vital route to commercialisation," says Judith. "And when collaboration leads to companies employing more people, that's a win for the region, and success in our eyes.
The model demonstrates how academic institutions can contribute to regional economic development while maintaining research excellence. Success metrics include not just publication and research outputs, but commercial outcomes that strengthen local companies and create employment opportunities.
For Rapid7, the partnership represents both product development investment and contribution to the local talent ecosystem. "If we as a company can create commercial value in our products and services and at the same time we're also contributing to the general local cyber security talent pool, then that's a win for everybody," says Damian.
Looking ahead, both organisations see the partnership as foundational to addressing expanding cybersecurity challenges. The research scope is evolving to encompass not just AI as a cybersecurity tool, but the security of AI systems themselves. The latter is a rapidly growing concern as AI adoption accelerates across industries.
"We're already looking at the next phase of the Cyber-AI Hub, and where we can scale," says Judith. The initiative has also expanded nationally through the LASR initiative, which brings together the Turing Institute, Oxford University, and Queen's as the UK Laboratory for AI Security Research.
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For Damian Horner, the partnership's success demonstrates its potential for continued growth.
"I can see it growing in a very practical sense. 'Incident Command' is our flagship SIEM product and the research that we're doing here is critical to it and critical to expanding on the success in the market that we have," he says.
The collaboration between Rapid7 and CSIT represents more than a research partnership, it's a strategic investment in Northern Ireland's ability to maintain its global cybersecurity leadership. By combining academic rigour with commercial expertise, the partnership creates a model for how regions can compete in rapidly evolving technology sectors while building the talent pipeline necessary for long-term success.
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