The new National Cyber Alert System comes out of the National Cyber Security Division of the DHS (cyber is the US government’s term for matters related to the internet) and is coordinated by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team, US-CERT.
NCAS will produce three email services. The Tips newsletter is aimed at non-technical home users, the Bulletins missive is targeted at technical users. Both are bi-weekly, and round up the latest internet security issues.
The Alerts service comes in both technical and non-technical flavors. This service provides information on threats and attacks in real-time. The first, issued yesterday, refers to MyDoom.B. All three services can be subscribed to at www.us-cert.gov.
US-CERT is a partnership of the NCSD and private sector players such as security vendors and early adopter types like banks. The CERT Coordination Center, out of Carnegie Mellon University, provides support.
The National Strategy, which was finalized last February, has user education as one of its key components. One of five US-CERT working groups formed in December is looking at this issue, and expects to report by March 1 this year.
While nobody can argue that teaching end users to not click on strange executable attachments is anything but a good idea, the flipside is that it is probably only a matter of time before an email virus tries to emulate a US-CERT Cyber Alert.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
