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Call for tenders | Publicação

A call for tender to advance MeliCERTes, the facility used by the CSIRTs in the EU to cooperate and exchange information

This EU public procurement with an indicative budget of €2.5 million is primarily open to Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs), national cybersecurity authorities as well as to consortia which also include IT service providers and management consultancies. The winning tender of the call entitled “Connecting Europe Facility – Cybersecurity Digital Service Infrastructure Maintenance and Evolution of Core Service Platform Cooperation Mechanism for CSIRTs –MeliCERTes Facility” will sign a three years contract with the European Commission.

The overall objective of this call (tender reference number: SMART 2018/1024) is the advancement of the facility MeliCERTes (to develop MeliCERTes II) in accordance with the evolving needs of the CSIRTs in the EU. The successful tender is requested to work closely with ENISA, the EU Agency for cybersecurity, which is in charge of operating the central aspects of the MeliCERTes facility and tasked to support the operation of the EU CSIRTs Network, established under the NIS Directive.

In particular, the tender is asked to:

  • support the operation of MeliCERTes in conjunction with ENISA, encompassing hardware and Helpdesk components;
  • maintain the software code, encompassing bug fixing, vulnerability assessment, testing and update management;
  • evolve the MeliCERTes platform with a new functionality in order to become a repository of open source tools developed by CSIRTs; and
  • provide a sustainable strategy for maintening MeliCERTes beyond the end of the project, involving EU Member States and ENISA.

This public procurement is funded by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom Work Programme 2018 which aims to support cybersecurity capacity building and operational cooperation of CSIRTs under the NIS Directive. This call is one of the three calls for tender that the European Commission launched this year under CEF. The other two are the following:

Background information

The MeliCERTes has been developed with the financial support of the European Union (public procurement SMART 2015/1089) in order to improve the operational co-operation and facilitate the sharing of information between the EU Member States' CSIRTs and across the EU. Its primary purpose is to facilitate cross-border co-operation encompassing data exchange between two or more CSIRTs based on the concept of trust circles i.e. ad hoc groups of CSIRTs which mutually agree on co-operation based on the concept of trust. MeliCERTes became operational in January 2019. 

The existing MeliCERTes version is using open source tools developed and maintained by CSIRTs. It allows for the use of any key functions undertaken by the CSIRTs, such as incident management, threat intelligence (encompassing event management, vulnerability management and threat management), secure communications and artefact analysis.

Related content

A call for tender to support the work of the NIS Cooperation Group

Call for tenders | 31 Maio 2019

This EU public procurement with an indicative budget of €1.5 million is primarily open to cybersecurity authorities, IT service providers and management consultancies, ideally, as part of a consortium. The successful tenderer of the call “Connecting Europe Facility – Cybersecurity digital service infrastructure establishment of a core service platform cooperation mechanism for cybersecurity cooperation” will sign a 3 years contract with the European Commission to assist the NIS Cooperation Group's work under the 2016 Directive on security of network and information systems (NIS Directive).