About FIRST

FIRST is the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams. The idea of FIRST goes back until 1989, only one year after the CERT(r) Coordination Center was created after the infamous Internet worm. Back then incidents already were impacting not only one closed user group or organization, but any number of networks interconnected by the Internet.

It was clear from then on that information exchange and cooperation on issues of mutual interest like new vulnerabilities or wide ranging attacks - especially on core system like the DNS servers or the Internet as a critical infrastructure itself - were the key issues for security and incident response teams.

Since 1990, when FIRST was founded, its members have resolved an almost continuous stream of security-related attacks and incidents including handling thousands of security vulnerabilities affecting nearly all of the millions of computer systems and networks throughout the world connected by the ever growing Internet.

FIRST brings together a wide variety of security and incident response teams including especially product security teams from the government, commercial, and academic sectors.