State of the Practice of Computer Security Incident Response Teams ...

Table 4 combines the total number of European teams who are FIRST members with non-
FIRST members identified in the European CSIRT directory. This information is collected
through August of 2003.
Table 4:
Total Registered European CSIRTs
Year
European
FIRST
Members
European
Non-
FIRST
Members
Total for
Europe
2000 31 22 53
2001 41 28 69
2002 48 28 76
2003 51 33 84
Looking at the numbers, it is clear that the number of non-FIRST teams in Europe is still
considerable, approximately one third of the total registered European teams. It also seems a
fairly stable number over the past few years. The larger growth in European FIRST teams
indicates that it is attractive to become a FIRST member once a team is established.
3.1.3 Total Registered CSIRTs
As previously discussed, registered CSIRTs are considered those who have gone through
some accreditation process and registered with FIRST, APCERT, or the Trusted Introducer.
Table 5 and Figure 5, which list the total registered teams broken down by geographic region
from 1990 through August 2003, show that the biggest growth in CSIRT development and
team establishment has been in Europe and North America (Canada and the United States).
This is not surprising, as the initial CSIRTs were all in the U.S., with Europe being the next
area to establish teams.
40 CMU/SEI-2003-TR-001