GE-CIRT Joins FIRST

I am pleased to announce that on Friday 19 March the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams, or FIRST, accepted the General Electric Computer Incident Response Team, GE-CIRT, as a full member.

This represents about a year of work for us. I am really proud of our team, especially since we reached initial operational capability on 1 January 2009.

I would like to thank James Barlow and Rob Renew for sponsoring our application; Sarah Gori for leading our application process; David Bianco for helping Sarah with technical aspects of the process; and our security team members for assisting with meeting FIRST's criteria.

If you are a member of an incident detection and response team but your team is not part of FIRST, please check out the membership process. I advocated joining FIRST for three reasons:

1. Joining FIRST is a sign to the world that your team has reached a certain level of maturity, stability, and capability.


2. The membership process itself will help focus your team's operations and may help justify process and capability improvements that you may or may not realize you need.


3. FIRST is a community of like-minded professionals with whom you can share information, practices, and lessons that might not be suitable for wider discussions.

When I speak at FIRST 2010 in Miami in June I will describe our membership process and more generally how to build a Fortune 5 CIRT. The conference is open to non-FIRST members, so please consider attending it.

Finally, I am still trying to fill a few of the roles listed here. I am particularly interested in finding a system administrator with FreeBSD and MySQL database experience, for our Information Security Infrastructure Engineer (job 1147859 at www.ge.com/careers). Please consider applying for one of the other roles within GE as well, listed below my jobs. Thank you.