References

Organisations

FIRST - Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams

Today FIRST is the only "umbrella" organisation that supports the work of CSIRTs and security teams around the world. FIRST has 200+ members in 40+ countries. Most of the members are located in North America and Europe, with more and more teams being established in Asia, Pacifica, Middle and South America.

FIRST defines itself in its Operational Framework as:

"... network of individual computer security incident response teams that work together voluntarily to deal with computer security problems and their prevention ..."

and describes it's main purpose as:

"The primary purpose of the FIRST is to provide a forum for participating organisations to work together to share current information, solve common problems, and plan future strategies."

The FIRST website (http://www.first.org) provides more information, like how to become a member. The next annual FIRST conference will be held in Kyoto, Japan starting 28 June 2009. See http://www.first.org/conference/2009/ for information about registration, program etc.

IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force

The IETF as subdivision of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is responsible for the development of protocols, their implementations and standardisation. In January 1986 the IETF was formed as forum to coordinate the work going on within the Arpanet, the US Defense Data Network (DDN) and the core of the Internet Gateway systems. Since that time the IETF grew to an large, open, and international community of designers, administrators, vendors and researchers. Their main task is to enable a suitable evolution of the internet architecture and a smooth operation of the internet.

The work within the IETF is organized within several areas and working groups. The area directors together with a chair build up the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).

Especially for the work of CSIRTs and security teams there are many current working groups which addresses technical topics of great concern for many teams. In addition the RFCs as de facto standard documents of the Internet are providing necessary details about protocols and formats used widely today.

• IETF website: http://www.ietf.org