What's New 2021

Last month, I was honored to be one of the planners and participants of the FIRST Technical Colloquium (TC) in Norway. Organized by FIRST members, the event was held just outside of Oslo at the Telenor Expo, Telenor headquarters in Fornebu.

Norwegian members of FIRST to host a technical colloquium in Oslo in November; More FIRST events to add to your calendar; The FIRST Board of Directors meets across two continents to build our two-year business plan; Empowering Women in Cybersecurity: ITU, FIRST, and EQUALS Global Mentorship Pilot Program concludes; 16 more member teams join FIRST;

Hunting a Zero day!

Alexander Jäger, Senior Security Engineer of Google, continues in his role as Chief Financial Officer

Did you miss our Virtual 33rd FIRST Annual Conference?; ICASI integrates into FIRST PSIRT SIG, bolstering the incident response and security team industry; FIRST Welcomes a new Chair and Five New Board of Directors; FIRST publishes its fifth Annual Reportt; A new fellowship team joins FIRST - Malawi CERT; Jeffrey Carpenter and Dan Kaminsky newly inducted into FIRST’s Incident Response Hall of Fame; FIRST membership continues to grow - we’re now at 575 members from 98 countries.

Jeffrey and Dan join past inductees Ian Cook, Don Stikvoort, and Klaus-Peter Kossakowski

FIRST published its fifth Annual Report which covers the organization’s accomplishments towards its vision of bringing together incident response and security teams from every country across the world to ensure a safe internet for all. The report is available at FIRST Annual Report 2020-2021.

ICASI – the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet was officially integrated into the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) on May 28, 2021. Established in 2008, ICASI’s purpose was to strengthen the global security landscape by driving excellence and innovation in security response practices; facilitating collaboration among members to analyze, mitigate, and resolve multi-stakeholder, global security challenges. This role will continue but as part of the existing FIRST PSIRT SIG, expand and improve the community’s ability to respond to vulnerabilities across multiple vendors. Founded in 1990, FIRST is the global leader in incident response.

33rd FIRST Annual Conference: Crossing Uncertain Times; Mark your calendars: FIRST reveals 2021 events calendar; FIRST welcomes its 97th country and member 562: Benin bjCSIRT; FIRST, ITU and Equals launches Women in Cyber Mentorship Program for Arab and Africa Regions; Get your nominations in for the third edition of The Incident Response Hall of Fame; New Podcast - FIRST Impressions - is launched!

Together, We’re Creating Better Threat Intelligence Sharing for the World

This evolving and brutally effective threat can have a significant impact on an organization’s resources, finances, and reputation, but it can be stopped

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) practitioners can gain insight into adversary operations by tracking conflicts or geopolitical tensions. Similar to a “follow the money” approach in criminal investigations, looking at conflict zones can reveal cyber capabilities deployed as part of events —either by the parties to the conflict itself, or third parties interested in monitoring events for their own purposes.