FIRST announces Incident Response training for Policymakers

8^th November 2017 – The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) today announced it will be organizing a training for policymakers on cyber security incident response, in conjunction with the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, December 18^th 2017.

Since 1989, FIRST has organized conferences, trainings and workshops for the technical incident response community, enabling them to share experiences and improve their capability at dealing with major security incidents. With the new course, FIRST will now engage with a new audience, policy analysts working on cyber security, who often have to make decisions that will impact computer security incident response teams (CSIRT).

FIRST Board member Maarten Van Horenbeeck, who coordinates the training, states: “FIRST has historically provided training to its own community, that of technical incident responders and security teams. This is, and will continue to be the focus of our work.

“However, with this new training we will provide the wider context of incident response to policymakers and policy analysts working on cyber security issues. This will support them in making optimal policy decisions, enabling our member teams to be more effective dealing with major cross-border security incidents.

“While for now this is a single event, we will release our materials under a creative commons license, so others in the community can reuse them, and we can maximize their impact.”

The training will cover topics such as how to fit incident response into a national cyber security strategy, the history of CSIRT teams, how they cooperate across international boundaries and most importantly, how these organizations develop trust relationships. In addition, the training will walk through a case study to truly help policy analysts understand how different organizations in the internet community deal with real life major incidents.

The instructors providing the training are Michael Hausding, Serge Droz and Maarten Van Horenbeeck, and the event will take place at the headquarters of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva on Monday, December 18^th 2017.

Interested parties can contact the FIRST secretariat via first-sec@first.org with further questions, or sign up for the training at https://www.first.org/events/training/geneva2017/.

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About FIRST

Founded in 1990, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) consists of internet emergency response teams from more than 360 corporations, government bodies, universities and other institutions across 78 countries in the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania. It promotes cooperation among computer security incident response teams. For more information, visit: https://www.first.org.