Improved Performance Planning Could Strengthen Technology Transfer

Agency News, Industry News, Power/Energy/Oil & Gas sector, Transport sector
A Department of Energy national lab developed a battery that now powers some hybrid and electric cars. But how do new energy technologies get from the lab to the market?
Transferring technologies from the DOE to private companies isn't always easy. Barriers such as the "valley of death"—a gap between the end of public funding and the start of private funding—can stop a transfer.
The Department of Energy (DOE) and its national labs have taken several steps to address potential barriers to technology transfer—the process of providing DOE technologies, knowledge, or expertise to other entities. GAO characterized these barriers as (1) gaps in funding, (2) legal and administrative barriers, and (3) lack of alignment between DOE research and industry needs. For example, the “valley of death” is a gap between the end of public funding and start of private-sector funding. DOE partly addresses this gap with its Technology Commercialization Fund, which provides grants of $100,000 to $1.5 million to DOE researchers to advance promising technologies with private-sector partners. Further, DOE's Energy I-Corps program trains researchers to commercialize new technologies and to identify industry needs and potential customers. However, DOE has not assessed how many and which types of researchers would benefit from such training. Without doing so, DOE will not have the information needed to ensure its training resources target the researchers who would benefit most.
DOE plans and tracks the performance of its technology transfer activities by setting strategic goals and objectives and annually collecting department-wide technology transfer measures, such as the number of patented inventions and licenses. However, the department does not have objective and measurable performance goals to assess progress toward the broader strategic goals and objectives it developed. For example, without a performance goal for the number of DOE researchers involved in technology transfer activities and a measure of such involvement, DOE cannot assess the extent to which it has met its objective to encourage national laboratory personnel to pursue technology transfer activities. Internal control standards for government agencies call for management to define objectives in measurable terms, either qualitative or quantitative, so that performance toward those objectives can be assessed. Moreover, DOE has not aligned the 79 existing measures that it collects with its goals and objectives, nor has it prioritized them. Some lab stakeholders said that collecting and reporting these measures is burdensome. Prior GAO work has found that having a large number of performance measures may risk creating a confusing excess of data that will obscure rather than clarify performance issues.
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NYU Tandon’s Index of Cyber Security sees rapid rise in nation-state concerns

Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News
The recent Solar Winds attack confirms fears from cybersecurity experts that threats from nation-states are on the rise.
Cybersecurity experts across the world reported a 5% rise in nation-state and targeted counterparty hacking concerns in December, according to an index issued by a research team from the NYU Center for Cybersecurity (CCS) at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. This rise appears to correlate closely with the recent “sunburst” attack on national and business infrastructure via SolarWinds’ Orion business software updates.
The Index of Cyber Security, which is updated monthly at the NYU CCS website, collects sentiment estimates via direct polling of practicing security experts around the world on cybersecurity threat-related issues. The index has operated since 2008, with CCS curating and hosting the research project for two years.
“When we saw this rise, we immediately connected it to the recent massive third-party software attack involving SolarWinds,” said NYU Tandon Distinguished Research Professor Edward Amoroso, who leads the ICS research team. “The experts who provide data for our index clearly saw this threat as increasing in intensity.”
An additional risk indicator that rose during the month was a shift toward cyberattacks being specifically aimed at counterparties. “This increased targeting of designated counterparties, versus devices, systems, or other non-human actors, is consistent with the motivation inherent in most nation-state campaigns,” said Amoroso.
The sentiment index is based on observational factors such as unpatched servers, unsatisfactory audit findings, and average time to respond to an incident. Amoroso’s academic research group at NYU Tandon’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering collaborates with TAG Cyber LLC, which supports information technology functions.
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INTERPOL report charts top cyberthreats in Southeast Asia

Agency News, Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News
An INTERPOL report has highlighted the key cybercrime trends and threats confronting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region.
INTERPOL’s ASEAN Cyberthreat Assessment 2021 report outlines how cybercrime’s upward trend is set to rise exponentially, with highly organized cybercriminals sharing resources and expertise to their advantage.
It provides strategies for tackling cyberthreats against the context of the pandemic which has seen more people going online using mostly unprotected mobile devices, creating a surge in cybercriminal activities profiting from the theft of personal information and credentials.
The report further describes the essential collaboration on intelligence sharing and expertise between law enforcement agencies and the private sector, facilitated by INTERPOL’s global network.
The INTERPOL’s ASEAN Cybercrime Operations Desk (ASEAN Desk) with the support from law enforcement agencies in the region and INTERPOL’s private sector cybersecurity partners identify the region’s top cyberthreats:
- Business E-mail Compromise campaigns continue to top the chart with businesses suffering major losses, as it is a high-return investment with low cost and risk.
- Phishing. Cybercriminals are exploiting the widespread use of global communications on information related to COVID-19 to deceive unsuspecting victims.
- Ransomware. Cybercrime targeting hospitals, medical centers and public institutions for ransomware attacks has increased rapidly as cybercriminals believe they have a higher chance of success given the medical crisis in many countries.
- E-commerce data interception poses an emerging and imminent threat to online shoppers, undermining trust in online payment systems.
- Crimeware-as-a-Service puts cybercriminal tools and services in the hands of a wider range of threat actors – even non-technical ones, to the extent that anyone can become a cybercriminal with minimal ‘investment’.
- Cyber Scams. With the increase of online transactions and more people working from home, cybercriminals have revised their online scams and phishing schemes, even impersonating government and health authorities to lure victims into providing their personal information and downloading malicious content.
- Cryptojacking continues to be on the radar of cybercriminals as the value of cryptocurrencies increases.
“Cybercrime is constantly evolving. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, which has opened new opportunities for cybercriminals,” said Craig Jones, INTERPOL’s Director of Cybercrime.
“Through this report, INTERPOL strives to support member countries in the ASEAN region to take a targeted response against ever-evolving cybercrime threats to protect their digital economies and communities,” added Mr Jones.
Under the mandate of reducing the global impact of cybercrime and protecting communities, the INTERPOL Regional Cybercrime Strategy for ASEAN sets out INTERPOL’s key priorities and principles against cybercrime in the region.
Delivered through INTERPOL’s ASEAN Desk and ASEAN Cyber Capacity Development Project, the strategy is underpinned by four pillars: enhancing cybercrime intelligence for effective responses to cybercrime; strengthening cooperation for joint operations against cybercrime; developing regional capacity and capabilities to combat cybercrime; and promoting good cyber hygiene for a safer cyberspace.
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Digital transformation in Europe: 3 key regulatory priorities for 2021

Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News
“Europe's mix of enabling regulatory environments, robust connectivity infrastructure and the lively ecosystem of digital technology providers is fuelling the Region's transformation and has proven critical in the resilience during the COVID 19 pandemic,” remarked Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau at ITU, as she welcomed participants of the ITU Regional Regulatory Forum for Europe on Regulation supporting digital transformation.
Held virtually in 2020, the Regional Regulatory Forum (RRF) is one of several milestones of the ITU Regional Initiative for Europe on Broadband infrastructure, broadcasting and spectrum management.
Organized with the support of the Agency for Electronic Communications and Postal Services (EKIP) of Montenegro, the Forum was opened by Vladan Djukanovic, EKIP Board Member, who highlighted the dependency which all sectors of economies now have on information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and services, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This dependency requires a strategic approach to connectivity.
3 key priorities for 2021
Beyond recognizing the work of the ITU on the REG4COVID platform and other activities related to policy and regulation, representatives attending the RRF agreed on the following three key strategic priorities for 2021:
- carrying out an assessment of regulatory measures undertaken in the context of COVID-19, including the capacity of internal networks and interconnection with other regions,
- accelerating broadband development to bridge the digital divide, especially in terms of coverage, and
- strengthening international cooperation in the field of regulation.
Sofie Maddens, Head of the BDT’s Regulatory and Market Environment Division, shared an insightful reminder of the changing role of regulation and the need for authorities to adapt their toolbox to ensure actions are fit for purpose and following ITU’s gold standard on “collaborative regulation”, the benchmark of fifth generation (G5) regulation.
Unlocking investment in connectivity
The role of data in supporting the deployment of broadband is a fundamental aspect of digital transformation and regulation. By informing more accurate ‘snapshots’ of markets, data facilitates the design and creation of the regulatory incentives needed to deploy networks efficiently.
During the Forum, ITU, the European Commission, BEREC, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank and UNICEF all presented data-driven approaches to smart decision making to create an enabling environment that unlocks the private investments needed to attain connectivity targets, such as the EU Gigabit Society targets of delivering 100 Mbps to all households by 2025.
Member States also shared their experiences in broadband mapping as a tool to accelerate broadband deployment using infrastructure, service and investment data gathered from network operators. National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) from Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany, and Lithuania, which have relatively advanced systems encompassing thousands of operators, other network operators (such as utilities), building companies, local and regional administrations, demonstrated how these platforms can enhance collaboration among various stakeholders and support the allocation of public funding leading to fruitful results.
NRAs from non-EU countries such as Albania, Georgia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia also presented their systems, and outlined their efforts towards unlocking investment whilst protecting competition. Given that the potential for improvements in broadband deployment is greater here than in EU countries, the need to allocate additional resources into mapping systems as fundamental enablers was noted.
Despite the recent progress in many non-EU countries taking steps towards harmonization with EU standards, many challenges remain, ranging from the high fixed and operational costs of setting up mapping systems to human capacity building within administrations, but also across operators.
Realizing untapped potential
While the EU regulatory framework for broadband mapping will undergo considerable revisions in 2021, non-EU countries, particularly in South Eastern Europe, have the potential monitor this process closely and leapfrog, establishing state of the art systems.
The background paper Broadband Mapping Systems in Europe and Regional Harmonization Initiatives focuses on the regulation underpinning broadband mapping systems, which are now essential tools for NRAs to allocate public funding efficiently and fostering cross-sector collaboration and investment whilst protecting competition. The paper traces the development of the European Union’s regulatory framework, its most recent and future developments, the actions undertaken by the European Commission and Member States in the field and, finally, looks at eight countries in South Eastern Europe.
I invite all stakeholders to join ITU’s workstreams dedicated to broadband development and regulation and to learn more from the Regional Regulatory Forum’s draft Outcome Report. I also invite you to engage with us on this topic and keep an eye on related activities for 2021 until we can hopefully meet again in person next September in Budva, Montenegro, as it is tradition for ITU Regulatory Forums for Europe.
[Source: ITU]
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Why effective disaster management needs responsible AI

Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News, Telecomms sector
The use of artificial intelligence holds promise in helping avert, mitigate and manage disasters by analyzing swaths of data, but more efforts are required to ensure that technologies are deployed in a responsible, equitable manner.
According to UNDDR, about 1.2 million lives have been lost worldwide and more than 4 billion people affected in disasters that took place between 2000 and 2019.
Faster data labelling
Cameron Birge, Senior Program Manager Humanitarian Partnerships at Microsoft, says their work in using AI for humanitarian missions has been human-centric. "Our approach has been about helping the humans, the humans stay in the loop, do their jobs better, faster and more efficiently," he noted.
One of their projects in India uses roofing as a proxy indicator of households with lower incomes who are likely to be more vulnerable to extreme events like typhoons. Satellite imagery analysis of roofs are used to inform disaster response and resilience-building plans. A simple yet rewarding avenue of using AI has been around data labelling to train AI models to assist disaster management.
One challenge, he noted, has been around "unbiased, good, clean, trusted data". He also encouraged humanitarian organizations to understand their responsibilities when making use of AI models to support decision-making. "You have to ensure you sustain, train and monitor these models," he advised. Microsoft also wants to promote more sharing of data with its 'Open Data' campaign.
Precise decision support
AI is becoming increasingly important to the work of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Supercomputers crunch petabytes of data to forecast weather around the world. The WMO also coordinates a global programme of surface-based and satellite observations. Their models merge data from more than 30 satellite sensors, weather stations and ocean-observing platforms all over the planet, explained Anthony Rea, Director of the Infrastructure Department at WMO.
AI can help interpret resulting data and help with decision support for forecasters who receive an overwhelming amount of data, said Rea. "We can use AI to recognize where there might be a severe event or a risk of it happening, and use that in a decision support mechanism to make the forecaster more efficient and maybe allow them to pick up things that couldn't otherwise be picked up."
Understanding the potential impact of extreme weather events on an individual or a community and assessing their vulnerability requires extra information on the built environment, population, and health.
"We need to understand where AI and machine learning can help and where we are better off taking the approach of a physical model. There are many examples of that case as well. Data curation is really important," he added.
WMO also sets the standards for international weather data exchange, including factors such as identifying the data, formats, and ontologies. While advocating for the availability of data, Rea also highlighted the need to be mindful of privacy and ethical considerations when dealing with personal data. WMO is revising its own data policies ahead of its Congress later this year, committing to free and open exchange of data beyond the meteorological community.
'Not a magic bullet'
Rea believes that AI cannot replace the models built on physical understanding and decades of research into interactions between the atmosphere and oceans. "One of the things we need to guard against in the use of AI is to think of it as a magic bullet," he cautioned.
Instead of vertically integrating a specific dataset and using AI to generate forecasts, Rea sees a lot of promise in bringing together different datasets in a physical model to generate forecast information. "We use machine learning and AI in situations where maybe we don't understand the underlying relationships. There are plenty of places in our area of science and service delivery where that is possible."
Rakesh Bharania, Director of Humanitarian Impact Data at Salesforce.org, also sees the potential of artificial or augmented intelligence in decision support and areas where a lot of contextual knowledge is not required. "If you have a lot of data about a particular problem, then AI is certainly arguably much better than having humans going through that same mountain of data. AI can do very well in answering questions where there is a clear, right answer," he said.
One challenge in the humanitarian field, Bharania noted, is scaling a solution from a proof of concept to something mature, usable, and relevant. He also cautioned that data used for prediction is not objective and can impact results.
"It's going to be a collaboration between the private sector who typically are the technology experts and the humanitarians who have the mission to come together and actually focus on determining what the right applications are, and to do so in an ethical and effective and impactful manner," he said. Networks such as NetHope and Impactcloud are trying to build that space of cross-sectoral collaboration, he added.
Towards 'white box AI’
Yasunori Mochizuki, NEC Fellow at NEC Corporation, recalled how local governments in Japan relied on social networks and crowd-behaviour analyses for real-time decision-making in the aftermath of 2011’s Great East Japan Earthquake and resulting tsunami.
Their solution analyzed tweets to extract information and identify areas with heavy damage and need for immediate rescue, and integrated it with information provided by public agencies. "Tweets are challenging for computers to understand as the context is heavily compressed and expression varies from one user to another. It is for this reason that the most advanced class of natural language processing AI in the disaster domain was developed," Mochizuki explained.
Mochizuki sees the need for AI solutions in disaster risk reduction to provide management-oriented support, such as optimizing logistics and recovery tasks. This requires “white box AI” he said, also known as ‘explainable AI’. "While typical deep learning technology doesn't tell us why a certain result was obtained, white box AI gives not only the prediction and recommendation, but also the set of quantitative reasons why AI reached the given conclusion," he said.
Webinar host and moderator Muralee Thummarukudy, Operations Manager, Crisis Management Branch at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), also acknowledged the value of explainable AI. "It will be increasingly important that AI is able to explain the decisions transparently so that those who use or are subject to the outcome of these black box technologies would know why those decisions were taken," he said.
[Source: ITU]
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Forests with diverse tree sizes and small clearings hinder wildland fire growth

Industry News, Power/Energy/Oil & Gas sector
Novel 3D computational study links observable forest characteristics with fire behavior and reveals how forest structure propagates fire
A new 3D analysis shows that wildland fires flare up in forests populated by similar-sized trees or checkerboarded by large clearings and slow down where trees are more varied. The research can help fire managers better understand the physics and dynamics of fire to improve fire-behavior forecasts.
“We knew fuel arrangement affected fire but we didn’t know how,” said Adam Atchley, lead author on a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led study published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. “Traditional models that represent simplified fuel structures can’t account for complex wind and varied fire response to actual forest conditions. Our study incorporated a varied, 3D forest and wind behavior. Adding diverse tree sizes and shapes slowed fire quite a bit, as did adding small gaps between trees. By examining the physics of fire-fuel behavior, we are able to see fundamentally how forest structure affects behavior.”
The study for the first time links generalized forest characteristics that can be easily observed by remote sensing and modeled by machine learning to provide insight into fire behavior, even in large forested areas.
Understanding how wildland fire behaves is necessary to curb its spread, and also to plan safe, effective prescribed burns. However, data is limited, and most studies are too simplistic to accurately predict fire behavior. To predict how fire will move through a forest, it is necessary to first paint an accurate picture of a typical forest’s diversity with varying density, shapes, and sizes of trees. But this is computationally expensive, so most studies target homogenous forests that rarely occur in nature.
Using its award-winning model, FIRETEC, on high-performance computers at Los Alamos, the team ran 101 simulations with U.S. Forest Service data for Arizona pine forests to realistically represent the variability of forests. The simulations coupled fire and atmospheric factors—such as wind moving through trees—at fine scales to provide a 3D view of how fire, wind, and vegetation interact.
To understand how the forest structure affects fire behavior, Atchley and colleagues repeated simulations with minor changes in the forest structure, which they made by moving trees and randomizing tree shapes. Small changes had monumental impact in fire behavior. However, despite highly variable fire behavior, observable forest characteristics, such as tree diversity and the size of a stand of trees or a clearing, also substantially control how fire spreads.
Results show that the more detailed and varied simulated forest decreases the forward spread of fire spread due to a combination of fuel discontinuities and increases fine-scale turbulent wind structures. On the other hand, large clearings can increase fire spread.
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DHS S&T Announces $36.5M Funding Opportunity for New Center of Excellence

Agency News, Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) announced a $36.5 million funding opportunity for a new DHS Center of Excellence (COE), Engineering Secure Environments from Targeted Attacks (ESE).
“Partnering with universities, S&T delivers practical results by developing multidisciplinary, customer-driven solutions while training the next generation of homeland security experts,” said William Bryan, Acting Under Secretary for Science and Technology. “The challenges we face as a nation are complex. In collaboration with our academic partners, DHS is excited to launch a new COE focused on mitigating long-term threats against our nation’s surface transportation and built environments with novel engineering solutions.”
DHS plans to fund the new COE through a cooperative agreement for 10 years for a total of approximately $36.5 million.
The ESE COE will research and develop solutions to support DHS counterterrorism and violent extremism operations. The COE will help DHS continue fostering a culture of “security by design” by providing intentional and flexible architecture solutions to thwart an adaptive adversary. ESE will also advance a skilled workforce of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians who focus on homeland security-related issues.
Technological advancements and their applications are increasingly complex and integrated into everyday processes. As cities grow larger and density increases across people, buildings, and infrastructure, a potential increase in the frequency or severity of targeted attacks from foreign and domestic terrorism is a legitimate concern. ESE will provide academic-led innovation that supports safer, more resilient transportation systems and communities.
DHS is soliciting proposals from multidisciplinary research and education teams, that will work closely with DHS and other subject-matter experts to develop approaches to strengthen the security of crowded spaces and transportation modalities. The teams will need various combinations of academic disciplines, including engineering, data analytics, and mathematics.
The DHS COEs work closely with DHS operating components to research, develop, and transition mission-relevant science and technology, and educate the next generation of homeland security technical experts. ESE will be required to engage with DHS operational components and fully understand the operational environment to help better identify technical and training gaps. Each DHS COE is led by a U.S. college or university and partners with other federally funded research and development centers, academic institutions, the commercial industry, and other federal, state, and local agencies.
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World’s most dangerous malware EMOTET disrupted through global action

Agency News, Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News
Law enforcement and judicial authorities worldwide have this week disrupted one of the most significant botnets of the past decade: EMOTET. Investigators have now taken control of its infrastructure in an international coordinated action.
This operation is the result of a collaborative effort between authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine, with international activity coordinated by Europol and Eurojust. This operation was carried out in the framework of the European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats (EMPACT).
EMOTET has been one of the professional and long lasting cybercrime services out there. First discovered as a banking Trojan in 2014, the malware evolved into the go-to solution for cybercriminals over the years. The EMOTET infrastructure essentially acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale. Once this unauthorised access was established, these were sold to other top level criminal groups to deploy further illicit activities such as data theft and extortion through ransomware.
Spread via Word documents
The EMOTET group managed to take email as an attack vector to a next level. Through a fully automated process, EMOTET malware was delivered to the victims’ computers via infected e-mail attachments. A variety of different lures were used to trick unsuspecting users into opening these malicious attachments. In the past, EMOTET email campaigns have also been presented as invoices, shipping notices and information about COVID-19.
All these emails contained malicious Word documents, either attached to the email itself or downloadable by clicking on a link within the email. Once a user opened one of these documents, they could be prompted to “enable macros” so that the malicious code hidden in the Word file could run and install EMOTET malware on a victim’s computer.
Attacks for hire
EMOTET was much more than just a malware. What made EMOTET so dangerous is that the malware was offered for hire to other cybercriminals to install other types of malware, such as banking Trojans or ransomwares, onto a victim’s computer.
This type of attack is called a ‘loader’ operation, and EMOTET is said to be one of the biggest players in the cybercrime world as other malware operators like TrickBot and Ryuk have benefited from it.
Its unique way of infecting networks by spreading the threat laterally after gaining access to just a few devices in the network made it one of the most resilient malware in the wild.
Disruption of EMOTET’s infrastructure
The infrastructure that was used by EMOTET involved several hundreds of servers located across the world, all of these having different functionalities in order to manage the computers of the infected victims, to spread to new ones, to serve other criminal groups, and to ultimately make the network more resilient against takedown attempts.
To severely disrupt the EMOTET infrastructure, law enforcement teamed up together to create an effective operational strategy. It resulted in this week’s action where by law enforcement and judicial authorities gained control of the infrastructure and took it down from the inside. The infected machines of victims have been redirected towards this law enforcement-controlled infrastructure. This is a unique and new approach to effectively disrupt the activities of the facilitators of cybercrime.
How to protect oneself against loaders
Many botnets like EMOTET are polymorphic in nature. This means that the malware changes its code each time it is called up. Since many antivirus programmes scan the computer for known malware codes, a code change may cause difficulties for its detection, allowing the infection to go initially undetected.
A combination of both updated cybersecurity tools (antivirus and operating systems) and cybersecurity awareness is essential to avoid falling victim to sophisticated botnets like EMOTET. Users should carefully check their email and avoid opening messages and especially attachments from unknown senders. If a message seems too good to be true, it likely is and emails that implore a sense of urgency should be avoided at all costs.
As part of the criminal investigation conducted by the Dutch National Police into EMOTET, a database containing e-mail addresses, usernames and passwords stolen by EMOTET was discovered. You can check if your e-mail address has been compromised at www.politie.nl/emocheck. As part of the global remediation strategy, in order to initiate the notification of those affected and the cleaning up of the systems, information was distributed worldwide via the network of so-called Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs).
The following authorities took part in this operation:
- Netherlands: National Police (Politie), National Public Prosecution Office (Landelijk Parket)
- Germany: Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt), General Public Prosecutor's Office Frankfurt/Main (Generalstaatsanwaltschaft)
- France: National Police (Police Nationale), Judicial Court of Paris (Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris)
- Lithuania: Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau (Lietuvos kriminalinės policijos biuras), Prosecutor’s General’s Office of Lithuania
- Canada: Royal Canadian Mounted Police
- United States: Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, US Attorney's Office for the Middle District of North Carolina
- United Kingdom: National Crime Agency, Crown Prosecution Service
- Ukraine: National Police of Ukraine (Національна поліція України), Prosecutor General’s Office (Офіс Генерального прокурора)
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ENISA release new report and training material to fight cybercrime and improve cooperation

Agency News, Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News
The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity releases a new report and training material to support the cooperation among CSIRTs, Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and their interaction with the judiciary.
The publications are designed to help tackle the challenges of this complex multi-stakeholder cooperation. The report, the handbook and the toolset are a set of deliverables complementing each other as follows:
- The report analyses roles, duties, competences, synergies and potential interferences across Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) - in particular, national and governmental ones, LE and judiciary (prosecutors and judges);
- The handbook helps a trainer explain these concepts through different scenarios;
- The toolset consists of exercises meant for trainees based on the handbook’s scenarios.
The report proposes a methodology to analyse the legal and organisational framework defining the roles and duties, the required competencies of CSIRTs and LE. It also identifies synergies and the potential interferences that may occur while engaging in the activities needed to respond to incidents of criminal nature and in fighting cybercrime.
In addition, it presents a detailed analysis focusing on Czechia, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, and Sweden. The methodology proposed can be used for a more comprehensive future analysis covering additional countries as it is based on:
- desk research;
- subject matter expert interviews;
- the segregation of duties (SoD) matrix.
This SoD matrix is also available in the ENISA repositories in GitHub, as well as the documentation on the Reference Security Incident Taxonomy Working Group (RSIT).
The RSIT working group will meet today as part of the 62nd TF-CSIRT Meeting. These are two other examples of the efforts ENISA engages in to contribute to building a bridge between CSIRTs and LE communities.
Main conclusions of the 2020 report on CSIRTs and LE cooperation include:
- The communities already engage in a number of actions meant to:
  - Avoid interferences wherever possible;
  - Create effective partnerships;
  - Use their synergies to support each other.
- However, interferences may still happen in the process of incident handling and cybercrime investigations, mainly because of the difference in purpose and mandate of each of these communities, i.e. incident mitigation (CSIRTs) compared with evidence preservation and criminal prosecution (LE and the judiciary).
- Joint training activities are organised mainly in community pairs, being either CSIRT and LE or LE and the judiciary. Such activities rarely involve the three communities. The joint training activities help the wider development of the competences required to respond to cybercrime.
- Overall, the 2019 pandemic of the COVID-19 virus did not have any significant impact on cooperation and exchanges between the three communities and their ability to function. Interaction even increased in some instances. For example, daily dialogues became more frequent in order to ensure that each community was kept informed as the situation evolved.
The response to cybercrime requires the cooperation of all actors involved. In this response, CSIRTs, LE and the judiciary perform each a different role and seek different objectives. Helping CSIRTs, LE and the judiciary understand their roles, duties and competences reciprocally will allow a closer cooperation while building on synergies and hence avoid possible interferences.
ENISA has been collecting input from the communities and compiling reports to shed light on the different aspects of the cooperation. These efforts are meant to further enhance the cooperation between CSIRTs and LE and their interaction with the judiciary, In addition, the Agency has been developing training material and co-organising the annual ENISA-EC3 workshop on CSIRT-LE Cooperation. The last edition of this event took place on 16 September 2020.
This new report and training material build on the work already completed in the area over the past. It contributed to the implementation of the ENISA programming document 2020-2022. The work conducted by ENISA in this area is planned to continue in 2021.
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DHS Awards $1.5M to Small Business for First Responder Emergency Alerts Technology Development

Agency News, Health & Social Care, Industry News, Transport sector
As emergency communications technologies adapt to an increasingly interconnected nation, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) today announced it awarded more than $1.5 million to develop an Alerts, Warnings, and Notifications (AWN) Guidance Tool. The program planning app, which will be available through a portal at FEMA's website, is expected to provide customized resources, best practices and program templates to address the most pressing challenges of alert originators, helping public safety agencies at the federal, state, local, tribal and territorial levels disseminate emergency and life-saving information.
“From the devastating wildfires on the West Coast to the very active Atlantic/Caribbean 2020 hurricane season to the ongoing COVID-19 public health emergency, there is a growing need to push actionable information out quickly to the public in order to save lives,” said Antwane Johnson, director of FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) office.
S&T awarded $1,542,113 through its Long-Range Broad Agency Announcement (LRBAA) program to Corner Alliance, Inc., a small business consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. and Boulder, CO. The research and development of this tool is a continuation of S&T’s partnership with FEMA in creating the IPAWS Program Planning Toolkit, aimed at assisting public safety agencies in minimizing alerting delays; planning for future alerts, warnings and notifications enhancements; facilitating interoperability across different technologies; and improving information sharing among emergency management and public safety officials.
“First responders rely on information to make life saving decisions, often with very little time to spare,” noted William Bryan, DHS Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary for Science and Technology. “This tool will help public safety agencies respond quickly and decisively during emergencies or catastrophic events, and that allows the greater homeland security enterprise to be more prepared and resilient.”
The documents in the IPAWS Program Planning Toolkit were produced based on recent innovative changes to technology and derived from the collection of successful practices and lessons learned from hundreds of data points from stakeholders, including emergency managers, public information officers, alerting originators and administrators, and alerting experts.
“FEMA and DHS S&T plan to expand the toolkit into an online, user-friendly format that will allow stakeholders to download and print pre-filled planning documents with their information,” said DHS S&T Program Manager Norman Speicher. “Through this development, our team will continue utilizing a stakeholder validation process.”
To learn more about the LRBAA program, please visit https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/st-lrbaa.
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