I am very surprised by this announcement. The service announced here in in my opinion NOT a CERT service but a CERT coordination service. I have some questions/remarks with this : - How does this fit into the Concert-in-E proposal ?? - Such a european coordination body can only have success if : - it is supported by all the service providers in Europe. When dealing with security issues, you just can't differentiate between national research networks and commercial providers. - all service providers need to have trust into the provider of this service (sorry but I am afraid that this is not the case for DANTE). - there is only one such coordination service in Europe. You can't have several of such coordination centre. In that case you will miss "the coordination". - I am surprised that some organisation declares one-sided that it will take on this role (even if "some" national networks have asked so). Normally such a coordination task should be set up in cooperation with all the service providers in order to have success. But probably I am just misreading the announcement and it doesn't has anything to do with a CERT coordination Center. Please tell me the difference in that case. Best regards, Stephan Biesbroeck --- Stephan Biesbroeck Tel: +32(0)2-2383470 stephan@belnet.be Fax: +32(0)2-2315131 Service Support Team of the Belgian National Research Network, BELNET Howard Davies wrote :

DANTE is pleased to announce that, at the request of a number of national networks, it proposes to create a European level CERT service.

The objectives of the DANTE CERT service will be:

- co-ordination of incident handling between member CERTs and with other incident response teams worldwide - co-ordination of technical assistance to member CERTs - maintenance of an information server on operational aspects of computer security - assistance for the establishment of new CERTs - providing backup and support to resolve problems that cannot be handled by a member CERT.

The DANTE CERT service will build on the expertise and experience of the national CERTs that are already in place. An important aspect of the organisational structure will be to minimise the overlap of activities and to ensure that all available resources are used in the optimum way.

The DANTE CERT will participate fully in existing international bodies dealing with incident response and security. Full membership of FIRST will be applied for.

As is DANTE's normal practice, many of the operational components of the DANTE CERT activity will be sub-contracted; discussions on how best to do this are already taking place with organisations which are interested in carrying out this task.

The DANTE CERT service is expected to be established early in 1995. Its priority will be to serve the networking organisations in the European research community but other organisations may also subscribe. Subscribing organisations will pay an annual fee which will be set as a function of size of the community that the organisation represents.

Individuals who wish to be included on the mailing list for the announcement of further details should send a request in reply to this message

Howard Davies

HD(94)276