UBITECH organised and hosted, on 15 and 16 October 2026 in Athens, the kick-off meeting of SignAIL, the Horizon Europe Innovation Action on “Strategic Intelligence for the Detection and Triage of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference”. Over two days, the consortium partners aligned the project’s objectives, work plan, technical architecture, governance and exploitation strategy, and set the course for a 24-month programme of work that started on 1 October 2026 and runs until 30 September 2028. SignAIL is co-funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement ID 101309373, within the Civil Security for Society cluster of Horizon Europe and its Strengthened Security Research and Innovation (SSRI) strand. Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) has become one of the most pressing threats to Europe’s democratic resilience, economic security and public trust. Influence operations now blend coordinated inauthentic behaviour across social media, narrative seeding on the surface and dark web, synthetic and deepfake media, and financial infrastructures that span multiple blockchains, which makes detection, attribution and timely response a complex, multi-domain challenge for competent authorities. SignAIL answers this challenge by delivering an operational, near-market capability that enables European authorities to detect, assess and respond to FIMI in real time.
The project combines large-scale open-source intelligence, drawn from the surface web, the dark web, social media and cross-chain financial infrastructures, with AI-enabled analysis, knowledge-graph reasoning, coordinated inauthentic behaviour detection, deepfake and synthetic media forensics, and narrative tracking. Its outputs are designed for action: SignAIL provides secure escalation pathways to competent authorities and online platforms that are aligned with the Digital Services Act, generates provenance-preserved and timestamped evidence bundles that can withstand legal and regulatory scrutiny, and offers a Marketplace environment where public buyers and SMEs can access, test and reuse the project’s tools, playbooks and procedures. In this way the action pursues the SSRI objective of accelerating the uptake of advanced SME-driven security innovation by the European security practitioner community.
The SignAIL consortium brings together eight organisations from six European countries. Coordinated by UBITECH, it comprises Adrestia Research (Greece), Information Technology for Market Leadership, ITML (Greece), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy), Trust-IT Services (Italy), Commpla (Italy), Arthur’s Legal (the Netherlands) and the Serviciul de Protecție și Pază, SPP (Romania), the Romanian Protection and Guard Service, which anchors the project in the operational needs of a security practitioner and end user.
UBITECH’s role in SignAIL
UBITECH is the coordinator of SignAIL and carries the overall project management and consortium coordination. This includes resource planning and distribution, continuous project monitoring and corrective actions where needed, quality assurance of all deliverables, risk management and the systematic consideration of external factors that may affect the action. These tasks are delivered by UBITECH’s Project Management Office (PMO), led by Ms Christina Stratigaki.
On the technical side, UBITECH is responsible for the Dark and Surface Web Data Collection for Intelligence Gathering. The company is building a highly configurable, multi-threaded web crawling and intelligence system with semantic capabilities, whose goal is to collect, harmonise and analyse signals of FIMI, including patterns, motifs, variations and indicators of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, synthetic media, narrative seeding and asset reuse. Data collection, storage and analytics follow a human-in-the-loop and automated crawling configuration approach. At the core of the crawler, a genetic algorithm refines captured keywords and content and generates new, optimised keywords that steer searches towards more pertinent URLs through established social media platforms and dark and surface web indexing tools. Investigation tools will help analysts identify relevant content using specific keywords, encoded terms, dates, locations, media hashes and other attributes, while natural language processing provides wide and multilingual coverage of sources and of the indicators and semantics of FIMI.
UBITECH also drives the LLM-driven Knowledge Graph and the Evidence-based Risk Assessment and Reporting of SignAIL. The company optimises large language models to enhance and populate a knowledge graph with data on actors, actions, temporal and spatial factors and motif correlations. The graph is systematically attributed and weighted to support comprehensive risk assessments and reporting, allowing both current and emerging modi operandi of FIMI activities to be measured. In the same context, UBITECH designs and develops a real-time service that provides risk assessment capabilities for companies targeted by FIMI, featuring innovative analytics for the detection of risk factors and anomalies in the companies’ ownership structure and other characteristics. These technical contributions are delivered by UBITECH’s Data & AI Systems (DAI) Research Group, led by Dr Sophia Karagiorgou.
“Hosting the SignAIL kick-off in Athens was the natural starting point for an action we are proud to coordinate,” said Ms Christina Stratigaki, Head of UBITECH’s Project Management Office. “FIMI is no longer a communications problem; it is a security problem that cuts across platforms, jurisdictions and financial systems. SignAIL brings together intelligence collection, AI-driven analysis and legally robust evidence into a single operational capability, and it does so with a clear route to market through the project’s Marketplace. For UBITECH, it is also a milestone in our cybersecurity and intelligence portfolio, combining our coordination experience with the applied AI expertise of our research groups.”
More information about SignAIL is available on the project’s CORDIS page. Updates on the project’s progress will be published on the UBITECH website and on the company’s LinkedIn channel.
