ENISA
Launched more than 10 years ago, the European Competent Authorities for Secure Electronic Communications (ECASEC) group serves as a platform for collaboration and exchange of information among the national authorities supervising telecom security in Europe. The ECASEC group also develops and endorses guidelines for telecom security authorities on how to implement different aspects of EU telecom security policy.
Highlights of the 35th ECASEC Expert Group meeting
A total of more than 50 experts from national authorities supervising the European telecom sector in the EU, EFTA, EEA, and EU candidate countries attended the meeting held on 14 October, with almost a third of them being present physically.
The meeting was the opportunity for the experts to follow an analysis of the supply chain threat landscape recently published by ENISA. BEREC also presented their report on the location of the Network Termination Points. The location of the Network Termination Points has an impact on whether an equipment is part of the public network or part of the telecommunications terminal equipment (TTE) and that distinction affects in turn the legal power of the National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs).
ENISA introduced the main points of the upcoming ENISA reports on Consumer Outreach and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) Security and participants listened to an analysis of Confidentiality, Integrity and Authenticity attacks in public electronic communication networks. This type of attacks is of great interest for the members of the ECASEC Expert Group since the definition of security in the EECC includes also confidentiality of communications.
Finally, the group dived into the recent Facebook outage and stressed the need for streamlining the incident reporting process so as to avoid unclear and overlapping obligations on providers and effectively cover cross-border incidents that involve several countries.
Besides the ECASEC meeting, the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) hosted the 1st edition of the ENISA Telecom Security Forum on 13 October. The goal of this event, held in a hybrid format, was to bring together experts from both national authorities and the private sector to exchange views and discuss cybersecurity challenges and good practices.
Moreover, ENISA hosted the NIS Cooperation Group Work Stream 10 (WS10), the group of EU national authorities supervising the security of the digital infrastructure under the NIS Directive, the day before the Telecom Security Forum. On the day of the Forum, the members of ECASEC Expert Group and of WS10 had a joint meeting to discuss about common threats, challenges and possible synergies.