International issues

IRIS-CERT was elected a member of FIRST (Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams) on 11th of February of 1997.

FIRST is the main international coalition working in the field of security incident response. Among its members are some of the main incident response teams, government agencies, research networks, law enforcement agencies, hardware and software vendors.

Member list, maintained by FIRST.
European member list, maintained by DFN-CERT.
Members' PGP keys.

On 1st of May of 1997 TERENA's pilot project EuroCERT (formerly known as SIRCE) started operations. It's run by a coalition of DANTE and UKERNA.

EuroCERT is based in the requirements described in the final report produced at the end of TERENA's task force 'CERTs in Europe'. A call for proposals followed this document. Although every submitted proposal met its requirements, DANTE/UKERNA's ranked first and was awarded the pilot management.

RedIRIS has contributed in this proyect until its ended in September 1999.

Currently IRIS-CERT is contributing in the TERENA Task Force,TF-CSIRT (CSIRT Coordination for Europe), to encourage and support the cooperation between CSIRTs in Europe.

The main activities of this Task Force are the following:

IRIS-CERT is level 2 team in the TENERA Trusted Introducer Service since 23th March 2001.

The European Commission has published a draft of a recommendation for the European Parliament, regarding the need of secure communications and the current trends in digital signature, encryption and/or key escrowing.

You can read here the complete text or a summary.

It has also called on several European experts to hear their opinions on this subject. The hearing will be held in Copenhagen in April 23rd, 1998. Learn more about it here.