The tasks faced by a modern Computer Emergency Response Team today go far beyond managing damage. Doing without prevention, training, education, cooperation, and machine learning has become unthinkable for anyone who wants to keep up with cybercrime.
SWITCH-CERT will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year. Soon after the first ‘worms’ appeared on the Internet, the Swiss Internet pioneer SWITCH decided to grapple systematically with the issue of security in order to protect its customers. The result, founded in 1996, was one of the first Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERT) in Switzerland. Since then, the team has continued to grow and develop and is today a multi-sector CERT for Swiss universities, domain registry, banks, industry, and logistics & energy. It is also one of two national CERTs for Switzerland. The Federal Office of Civil Protection considers it critical infrastructure for Switzerland.
Today, SWITCH-CERT provides its customers with a broad range of services. The spectrum reaches from preventative provision of information, awareness raising and training through to continuous updates about the specific threat situation (threat intelligence) for our customer groups. On top of that, we coordinate incident management, combat the abuse of .ch and .li domain names, and provide managed security services. Our services include the SWITCH DNS Firewall, operation of an OT (see box) lab, and forensic analysis of successful attacks.
Given the global dimension of the threat, international collaboration with a high level of trust is becoming more and more important. SWITCH had the foresight to build up such collaborations over many years and continues to expand them systematically today.
Targeted expansion of our activities in additional sectors allows us to broaden and improve our range of services, refine our understanding of the threat situation in Switzerland, and work more efficiently. In addition, since our strong centre of expertise brings together experts in one place, we are also able to keep up with the rapid developments in cybercrime. Universities and research institutions are among the beneficiaries. Continuously improving their protection still remains one of our primary objectives.
The following four articles will give an insight into the diversity of the issues SWITCH-CERT faces and its activities:
SWITCH-CERT protects your critical ICT infrastructure against cyber attacks.