FIRST and IL-CERT

Funny thing how I got to go to Miami last week…

So, one time, at security camp, I figured that there isn’t a whole lot of infrastructure in my back yard to really call a decent CERT. I have experienced that multiple times (and again and again) when handling major incidents that prompted incident handling in dozens of countries around the world, and when trying to do the same back home (in Israel), I got “bobkes”.

The thing is, there are currently two “CERTs” operating in Israel – an academic one (ILAN-CERT) which only server a portion of the actual academic networks in Israel (surprise surprise…), and CERTGOV-IL (which seems to be mostly in maintenance mode, and only server the government sites). Bottom line – if you want to report an incident that does not fall into these CERTs constituency (about 90% of the cases), you are out of luck…

So, just like the ever-optimistic fool that I am, I decided to give it a try and start a normal IL-CERT. Back at the time when I started to dance the political/bureaucratical dance I figured that it would be a good idea to present at FIRST2010 as IL-CERT would be alive by then. Ahhh, the optimism…

Months went by, emails flew, and meeting were held, and I arrived at the FIRST conference with only a glimmer of hope for a decent CERT. I almost dropped all hope for it, but then had a great time running into the FIRST crowd. Every time I got into a conversation with a member, I usually got the same question: “so, can I send you information on incidents in Israel? Because there isn’t anyone to send data to for years”.

Embarrassing. Nothing less (and to think that there was another Israeli “CERT” member onsite…). Long story short – I’m currently willing to put my hiney on the line and at least be able to say that I tried.

So here goes – I’m publishing an open call to anyone local who would like to participate and contribute to the IL-CERT. Also – if you need/want to report on any incident related to the constituency of a decent IL-CERT, please feel free to pass it my way until we set up the basic infrastructure for IL-CERT.

Wish me (us?) luck and godspeed. And thanks again to everyone who I met at FIRST-2010 and have reinforced my crazy endeavor.


Comments

2 responses to “FIRST and IL-CERT”

  1. […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wim Remes, Iftach Ian Amit. Iftach Ian Amit said: [Blog spam] Lessons learnt from #FIRST2010 and going head-first to set up IL-CERT http://www.iamit.org/blog/2010/06/first-and-il-cert/ […]

  2. […] It then picked up some speed when I started meeting people with similar interests and vision here in Israel, and we started to discuss how should a CERT be built, given the current situation (a government CERT with minimal constituency and no civil coverage, and an academic CERT that only covered a small part of the universities). There were a lot of toes to step on, and we were trying to map out the dance floor before rolling out to our crazy dance. It also started my own personal research into the CERT world, and led me to meet some great people from the FIRST community. […]

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