• A regional CSIRT, a response centre for cyberattack emergencies, opened in Hauts-de-France a month ago.
  • It is an assistance platform for communities, associations and companies that are victims of hacking.
  • And more than one emergency response, the CSIRT provides prevention and diagnostic services in the face of the cyber threat.

Pirate hunters. For almost a month, local authorities, associations or SMEs in Hauts-de-France have had a single organization to turn to in the event of a cyberattack. It is a task force of experts gathered under the acronym CSIRT, for "Computer security incident response team".

Viciously attacked by the hackers of the Royal group on the first of March, the city of Lille could not call on the services of the CSIRT Hauts-de-France for the simple reason that it was not yet operational. The municipality then managed with the means at hand, asking for advice on the procedure to follow from the municipalities that had lived this unpleasant experience before it. From now on, victims have a single interlocutor to turn to, which will greatly facilitate things, especially in terms of responsiveness to the threat. According to ANSSI, the regional CSIRTs must make it possible to provide a first-level incident response service locally and free of charge.

A hotline in case of cyber emergency

Concretely, it is a hotline with a toll-free number that victims can call if they think they are the object of a cyberattack. At the end of the line, security experts first proceed to "a prequalification of the incident", just to determine the procedure to follow: intrusion, data theft, ransomware...

Once the attack is characterized, the CSIRT refers victims to service providers, who will be responsible for "responding to the incident". The CERT-FR (Government Center for Monitoring, Alerting and Response to Computer Attacks), insists on the fact that the services of the CSIRT are complementary to those offered by IT security providers and other platforms such as the Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr site.


"Prevention, awareness and support"

In addition to assistance in the event of a crisis, the cyberattack emergency response center has a role of "prevention, awareness and support" of communities, associations and companies in the face of cyber threats. The city of Angers, for example, had learned the hard way that municipalities were ultimately prime targets for pirates.

There must be a "rise in maturity" of territorial actors, insists the CERT-FR. And to make these potential targets clearer, the organization offers them a risk assessment, like the pre-diagnoses set up by the cyber gendarmes of Calvados, pioneers in the field. This is a scanIP campaign to "assess vulnerabilities" in the systems of regional communities and companies.

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  • Nord-Pas-de-Calais