Security Organizations

ISSA Information Systems Security Association

The ISSA is a not-for profit international organization of information security professionals and practitioners. It provides education forums, publications and peer interaction opportunities that enhance the knowledge, skill and professional growth of its members.

FIRST Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams

The FIRST provides a forum for facilitating trusted interactions among incident response and security teams. Assistance for interactions is available on either a team to team basis (through introduction to teams) or by using the FIRST infrastructure to share information among all members in a secure way. The increased ability to communicate with peer entity teams allows for faster resolution of computer security incidents, regardless of their source, destination, or transit path.

FedCIRC The Federal Computer Incident Response Center

is the federal civilian agencies' trusted focal point for computer security incident reporting, prevention, and response. FedCIRC is part of the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD), a division of the Information Analysis and infrastructure Protection (IAIP) Directorate in the Department of Homeland Security.

ISACA Information Systems Audit and Control Association

The ISACA exists to assist IT governance, control and assurance stakeholders deal with IT management, IT risk and IT process, and their interaction with corporate governance, corporate management, corporate risks and corporate processes. ISACA does that by providing value through various services, such as research, standards, information, education, CISA certification, and professional advocacy. The Association helps IS audit, control and security professionals focus not only on IT, IT risks and security issues, but also on the relationship between IT and the business, business processes and business risks.

ISC² International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, Inc

The ISC² is an international organization dedicated to the certification of Information Systems Security professionals and practitioners. ISC² grants the Certified Information Systems Security Practitioner (CISSP)designation to information systems security practitioners. Candidates are required to pass a rigorous CISSP examination, have eight years of partical security exprience, and subscribe to the ISC² Code of Ethics.

CERT Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.

The CERT Coordination Center, studies Internet security vulnerabilities, provides incident response services to sites that have been the victims of attack, publishes a variety of security alerts, researches security and survivability in wide-area-networked computing, and develops information to help you improve security at your site.

CIAC Computer Incident Advisory Center, US Department of Energy (DOE)

CIAC provides on-call technical assistance and information to the DOE sites faced with computer security incidents. This central incident handling capability is one component of all encompassing service provided to the DOE community. The other services CIAC provides are: awareness, training, and education: trend, threat, vulnerability data collection and analysis: and technology watch. This comprehensive service is made possible by a motivated staff with outstanding technical skills and a customer service orientation. CIAC is an element of the Computer Security Technology Center (CSTC) which supports the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

SANS System Administration, Networking, and Security Institute

SANS is a cooperative research and education organization through which more than 62,000 system administrators, security professionals, and network administrators share the lessons they are learning and find solutions for challenges they face. As a part of this effort, SANS offers a series of exceptional educational conferences featuring up to eight days of in-depth courses and multi-track technical conferences focusing on user experiences and problem solving. SANS also produces a series of cooperative research reports, electronic digests, posters of authoritative answers to current questions, and cooperatively-created software.

USENIX Advanced Computing Systems Association

Since 1975 the USENIX Association has brought together the community of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world. USENIX and SAGE (The Systems Administrators' Guild) sponsor an annual security conference.