2025 Impact Report
The Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center funds new science, advises decision-makers, and convenes the global community at the intersection of cybersecurity, AI, and digital trust. Here is what that looked like in 2025.
Threats don't pause. Questions don't wait. Neither do we.
When the June 2025 12-Day War disrupted our conference calendar, we rescheduled Cyber Week, AI Week, and DefenseTech Week to December and delivered all three at full capacity before the year ended.
You may know us as the home of Cyber Week. We also fund research, advise governments, and partner with firms and universities to provide top-level cybersecurity research and policy advice.
What we do:
a competitive grants program, interdisciplinary by design, awarding foundational and applied grants across cybersecurity, AI, and digital trust
conducting commissioned research and providing policy advisory services to governments and institutions that can't wait for the academic publication cycle
collaborating with firms like Imperva and institutions including the National University of Singapore and Case Western Reserve University on joint research with real-world stakes
running Cyber Week, AI Week, and DefenseTech Week, the platforms where the field's agenda gets set
extending the work beyond high-income markets through partnerships with the World Bank and the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, to the economies where digital infrastructure is growing fastest.
Since 2015, more than 250 graduate researchers have built their careers through Center-funded work, each one carrying the deep understanding of cybersecurity and digital trust into the institutions and teams that will shape the world. In parallel, we delivered 5 Cyber Atlas programs to strengthen applied talent pipelines.
Whether it is the World Bank embedding cybersecurity into a US$105 billion development portfolio, Imperva investigating a vulnerability with large-scale downstream impact, or the National University of Singapore pushing the phishing-detection frontier, they come to us when the work has to be done right. We respond with the knowledge, the project leadership, and the capacity to deliver.
In 2025, we awarded six new grants, surpassing 100+ funded projects since founding. Co-funded with the Tel Aviv University Center for AI and Data Science (TAD), these awards back the science the next five years of cyber defense will rely on: from countering AI-generated misinformation to securing medical data in clinical AI systems.
These awards support projects in critical infrastructure protection, AI privacy and trust, digital identity, industrial cyber defense, and related cyber and AI fields.
These projects show how the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center turned academic work into visible public impact in 2025.
Imperva protects thousands of enterprises, from banks to governments, against web-based attacks. When their research team needed an academic partner to investigate a protocol-level flaw in HTTP/2, they came to us. Together, we uncovered a vulnerability affecting over 100 vendors and potentially billions of users, and coordinated responsible disclosure through US CERT before it could be exploited. This turned academic research into direct public protection at internet scale.
Covered by: SecurityWeek · The Register · The Hacker News · Israel Defense · Risky Biz · SOCRadar.
Interested in joint research with the Center? Talk to our research team.
The World Bank manages a lending portfolio of over US$105 billion, financing the infrastructure that billions of people in developing economies depend on. When its Digital Development team needed to embed cybersecurity into that infrastructure at scale, they came to us.
Together, we built the Sectoral Cybersecurity Maturity Model (SCMM) to boost resilience of entire economic sectors rather than individual organizations. By the end of 2023, we produced actionable resilience roadmaps for four critical sectors, financial services, healthcare, electricity, and telecommunications, across 11 countries in West Africa, Georgia, Sierra Leone, and Tajikistan, directly advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals by building the cyber resilience inclusive digital growth requires. In 2025, the underlying methodology was further developed and published.
Working on critical infrastructure resilience or digital development? Contact the Regional Cyber Resilience Laboratory
USENIX Security is one of the most selective venues in cybersecurity research.
Center researchers earned a place on that stage in 2025, alongside co-authors from the National University of Singapore (ranked among the world's top 10 universities), for a phishing-detection project advancing how AI systems identify and block social engineering at scale.
In 2025, Blavatnik ICRC delivered Cyber Week, AI Week, and DefenseTech Week at scale before year-end, after mid-year disruption.
The 2025 convening brought together senior policymakers, researchers, and internationally recognized speakers, including Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, to address infrastructure resilience, AI governance, and national security strategy.
We brought AI governance, health applications, and digital identity into the same room as the policymakers and industry leaders who have to act on them, because the gap between research and decision is where harm happens.
With unparalleled insights from Israel's distinctive geo-political environment and innovation in defense technologies, this conference showcases the latest advancements in emerging defense technologies.
In 2025, center researchers made over 480 media appearances (with center leadership accounting for more than 40), translating academic expertise into national impact. These three selected pieces highlight how this work shapes public awareness.
Feature placement in Haaretz’s global magazine edition.
National defense coverage that extends technical work into public-facing relevance.
Video commentary that broadens reach beyond the conference hall and research paper.
Explore publications, track the conference platforms, and stay close to the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center as we fund new research and keep connecting science to public consequence.
