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

In looking at the growth of teams each year, it can also be seen that the most significant
growth has occurred in the last four years, as the total number of registered teams doubled
from 79 in 1999 to 158 in 2002.
Growth in Total Number of Registered Teams
Number of Teams
200
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Year
Figure 6: Growth by Year of Total Number of Registered CSIRTs
3.1.4 CSIRT Growth by General Category
Figure 7 lists the regional distribution of the registered teams and shows their growth in five
general sectors. The five general sector categories are government, research, commercial,
national, and other. A “national” team claims a whole nation or country as its constituency
and has sufficient proof to show that the team is indeed regarded by that country as a CSIRT
for that constituency. Some national teams are government funded. Others are an outgrowth
of a research network that has expanded from handling incidents for just that network to handling
them for a whole country. 53
53
We applied these categories to the teams ourselves and therefore might have made a mistake in
assignment, but the trend information is still correct. This analysis was done to look only at general
trends.
42 CMU/SEI-2003-TR-001