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RNP staff is part of an international security group

RNP's Security Incident Response Team (CAIS) has just joined the greatest and most important international security group, the FIRST (Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams). This will bring a set of advantages, such as international visibility, greater cooperation with security groups from other countries and privileged access to information on security incidents and vulnerability.

The FIRST was founded in 1990 and today includes 97 security groups from practically all over the world. The objectives of the organization include encouraging joint initiatives to prevent, detect and solve problems related to security incidents; providing a way of communicating warns and giving advice on potential threats and emerging incidents; facilitating the acts of the FIRST's members, including research and operational activities; and facilitating the exchange of information, tools and techniques related to security.

Membership

In order to become a member of the FIRST, it is necessary to have a "sponsor;" that is to say, somebody who already belongs to the forum and is able to appoint a new staff to participate in it. The CAIS was in a recent FIRST meeting and made contacts so as to find this sponsor. He was found in David Crochemore, coordinator of the security group of the French academic network (Cert-Renater). Liliana Velasquez, CAIS's manager, declared that Crochemore's disposition was really gratifying "not only because he was interested in speeding up CAIS's membership process since the beginning, but also because both security groups work together with academic networks, which opens the possibility of greater partnerships involving Renater and RNP."

Crochemore visited RNP between August 27 and 30 in order to evaluate CAIS's work. The sponsor is responsible for preparing an evaluation of the candidate and sending it to the FIRST together with the documents necessary for membership.

Up to now, CAIS is the only Brazilian security group, and the second in Latin America, to become a FIRST member.

About CAIS

An important task in the operation of a network is the control of security incidents. As the Internet grows, this task becomes more and more vital, for the number of attacks tends to increase.

RNP created the CAIS - Security Incident Response Team - in August 1997 as a technical support unit to RNP's backbone, its Points of Presence and the institutions connected to them, with the aim of taking preventive, educational and corrective action concerning security incidents.

Detected, studied and solved security incidents can be made public, which helps prevent similar new attacks and stimulates the consolidation of a security culture among the network administrators. Depending on the nature of the information and the amount of confidentiality, this can be done by means of some restricted access lists or public warnings, shown on the page http://www.rnp.br/cais/alertas/, in RNP's portuguese site. According to Liliana Velasquez, CAIS today deals with an average of 580 incidents a month.

One of CAIS's attributions is exactly to associate with national and international groups aiming at preventing or reducing the number of occurrences and the magnitude of the damage caused by security problems in security networks. Besides participating in the FIRST, RNP was invited to belong to a subgroup created by the Information Security Steering Committee of the federal government (CGSI), and it intends to continue cooperating with similar actions through CAIS.

[RNP, 09.17.2001]