Press Release
Fundació .cat Joins GCA as a Partner that Focuses on Building a Safer Internet Ecosystem in Catalan
Barcelona, April 2. Today, after months of negotiations, the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) and Fundació .cat have announced their partnership. With this agreement, GCA gains a valuable partner for Domain Trust that further builds an international, cross-sectoral community of action to tackle domain name abuse, a plague of the Internet and a main pillar of cybercrime.
Domain abuse, for example, is key to phishing and online fraud, two crimes that cost millions of euros a year globally.
Fundació .cat is the first owner and manager of the .cat domain, created in 2005 as a central element for the expansion and consolidation of the digital ecosystem in Catalan, one of the most dynamic and committed in Europe.
On the verge of celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, this domain has a history of great growth and implementation in all areas of the digital life of Catalan speakers, from business and technology to education and culture.
In addition to its foundational commitment to the Catalan language, the strong territorial presence of the .cat domain makes it a unique ally for the dissemination of free cybersecurity tools that GCA has been compiling and distributing since 2019.
Neither GCA’s Cybersecurity Toolkits nor the Actionable Cybersecurity Tools (ACT) wiki are yet available in Catalan, which is why this collaboration brings very interesting future possibilities for all parties involved.
According to Terry Wilson, GCA’s Global Partnership Director, “the agreement with Fundació .cat is a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of our initiatives – that is, of our initiatives -i.e., cybersecurity and cyber hygiene in general- for the growth processes based on digitalization and presence on the Internet. Doing it with a partner like .cat, so consolidated to the Catalan territory, gives us capillarity and a mechanism to link the success of our actions to other added factors, such as identity and language.”
Roger Serra, CEO of the Fundació .cat, added: “The adhesion of .cat to GCA reinforces our commitment to cybersecurity.” For the organization, the agreement is part of a succession that confirms the growing social importance of cybersecurity trust on the Internet, in a framework of new legislative processes in the European Union, internal reforms in the industry of domain registrations, and coordinated actions against organized cybercrime groups.
As part of this trend, the GCA and the CyberSecurity Agency of Catalonia (Agència de Ciberseguretat de Catalunya) also announced a collaboration agreement in areas such as the protection of interconnected devices (IoT) and cyber hygiene of citizens.
About Fundació .cat
Fundació .cat is a private, non-profit organization that manages and owns the domain .cat. Its objectives are to promote activities related to the management and promotion of the .cat domain; to promote the Catalan identity and the normalization of the use of the Catalan language on the Internet and ICT. The cat domain was born in 2006 and was the first domain associated with a linguistic and cultural community.
About the Global Cyber Alliance
The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) is an international nonprofit organisation dedicated to eradicating cyber risk and improving our connected world. We build communities to deploy tools, services, and programs that provide cybersecurity at global scale.
For more information: www.globalcyberalliance.org
