Commission supports cross-border cooperation for cybersecurity

Currently, a majority of communication channels and platforms of both public and private Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) in the Member States have a purely national reach. With a few exceptions, cooperation on a technical and organisational level is mostly ad-hoc and unstructured. Europe does not make full use of its collective capabilities to improve cybersecurity. As a response, the European Commission is now setting up cooperation mechanisms that will serve those among national or governmental CSIRTs that are willing to use them.

These mechanisms will allow participating CSIRTs (participation is voluntary) to:

Share knowledge about vulnerabilities and threats and the use of common procedures and standards to mitigate them;
Utilise and build upon Member States’ and ENISA’s good practices and experience for cooperation to better prevent or mitigate threats;
Enhance their maturity and foster a culture of trust to support cooperation between them.

These cooperation mechanisms are to be established through the Connecting Europe Facility Core Service Platform instrument, and are aligned with and complement the enhanced cooperation prescribed in the Directive on security of network and information systems (the NIS Directive). The Directive, which entered into force last August, requires Member States to set up a CSIRT Network, which will allow swift and effective operational cooperation on specific cybersecurity incidents. The platform will be deployed from 2017 to 2019.

Commission supports cross-border cooperation for cybersecurity

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