First submission cycle for Surfshark's Cybersecurity Advocacy Fund opens in September
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Surfshark, one of the best VPN services, is now putting money behind the people it believes can help close the gap between online threats and public understanding. The company has launched a Cybersecurity Advocacy Fund worth up to €100,000 a year, aimed at students, researchers, and university groups.
The fund is designed to bridge academic research and real-world impact, pairing financial support with direct collaboration from Surfshark's in-house experts. Rather than funding its own products, it looks for ideas emerging from classrooms, labs, and creative spaces.
Scams have become one of the most common threats people face, and the fund's first cycle — which opens in September — arrives with anti-scam work named as a priority.
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Cybersecurity threats are evolving faster than most people can keep up with, from phishing and data leaks to increasingly sophisticated scams.
The scale is hard to overstate: independent research from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Feedzai estimates that around $442 billion is lost to scams worldwide each year, while Norton's data points to nearly 174 scam attempts every second.
Surfshark argues that closing that awareness gap takes more than corporate solutions. The company describes the fund as "an investment in expertise that sits outside our own walls," according to Gabriele Sinkeviciute, its Head of Product.
The idea grew out of "Bot or Not?", a Malmö University student project that found nearly half of participants could not reliably tell bot-written comments from human ones.
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To be eligible, applicants must be actively enrolled university students, employed faculty such as professors or researchers, or representatives of an officially recognized university group. Submissions are open worldwide, but pitches must be written in English.
The fund backs three types of work: creative advocacy, such as art installations or interactive campaigns that make digital threats tangible; academic research, including papers and studies on cybersecurity risks; and technological ideas, from prototypes to early-stage tools that Surfshark's experts can help refine.
Selected projects share in the annual pot of up to €100,000, which is distributed across multiple initiatives rather than handed to a single winner. Beyond money, teams gain technical guidance, industry insight, and support throughout development.
