Cyber Security Incident Response

A Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is a group of experts that handles computer security incidents. The term CSIRT, as an acronym for Computer Security Incident Response Team or Cyber Security Incident Response Team is also used.

As computer threads started to appeared after the development of the internet on the late 80s, there was a need to create teams that knew how to handle computer security incidents.

A CERT could belong to a public institution (e.g., CISA-CERT, that belongs to American CISA) or a private organization (e.g., Amazon SIRT, that belongs to Amazon). Some CERTs have an international scope, while some other are more focused on a country.

Many countries have an official CERT, whose goal is to provide cyber security to their citizens and organizations.

The first team called CERT was CERT-CC, created in 1988. It belongs to the Carnegie Mellon University (USA).

At the beginning of the 90s, CSIRT were starting to be created in the European Union under the TERENA program.

In 1989, FIRST (Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams) was founded. It is a global association of CERTs, and some of the most important ones over the world belong to FIRST association.

You can find all CERT teams belonging to FIRST on this link.

You can find a list of CERTs related to Spain on this link.

There is also a full list of CERTs on this link.

List of some of the existing CERTs: