FIRST membership for Belarusian cyber threat response center Cert.by

The Belarusian national center for responding to computer incidents Cert.by is now part of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), representatives of the Operations and Analysis Center (OAC) under the President of the Republic of Belarus told BelTA.

The Operations and Analysis Center is the founder of Cert.by. OAC representatives told BelTA that the establishment and membership of Cert.by in FIRST indicates the global community’s recognition of the steps Belarus makes in the area of computer security.

BelTA has been told that information and communication systems are now an essential factor of social and economic development. The safety of communication networks and data systems, particularly their performance and fall-over protection, are extremely vital these days, as computer systems get complicated, are prone to faults and errors as well as attacks to the infrastructure that provides critical services to the majority of citizens.

The creation of the Cert.by team was prompted by the lightning-fast spread of the computer worm Morris in the World Wide Web in the late 1980s. The incident was a wakeup call for people to understand the need to cooperate and coordinate their actions to fight such incidents in the future.

Representatives of the Operations and Analysis Center explained that there are many groups of IT experts in the world, who are meant to respond to computer security incidents. The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) coordinates incident responses at the international level by uniting computer security teams of government agencies, commercial corporations, and education institutions of various countries.

Cert.by is the team to go to for the sake of taking care of IT security in Belarus and is the regulator and the control center for all the other computer threat response teams in Belarus.

The Belarusian cyber threat response center Cert.by is tasked with reducing the level of information security threats in the national part of the World Wide Web. Cert.by collects, stores, and processes statistics regarding the propagation of malicious software and network attacks in Belarus. Cert.by also responds to incidents in data systems of government agencies and in data systems of those in Belarus, who apply for aid.