House of Lords looks at network resilience and CERTs

On Tuesday I was invited with Chris Gibson of FIRST to give evidence to the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the European Affairs Committee of the House of Lords. They are currently looking at the European Commission's proposals to protect Europe from large-scale Cyberattacks. We spent an hour and a half explaining what CERTs are, how they work together to deal with network security incidents and how groups such as FIRST, ENISA and TERENA help to make those responses quicker and more effective.

Although the members of the sub-committee seemed surprised that there was no central point coordinating incident response for the whole world, they did seem reassured at the speed with which organisations work together to resolve problems. They raised the concern (legitimate, I think) that heavy-handed intervention by governments could harm existing incident response mechanisms, and seemed to agree that it was better to expand and build on what already exists, sharing experiences with other regions of the world, rather than try to impose a completely new model.