FIRST CORE

A new direction for sponsorship was announced at the 37th Annual FIRST conference in Denmark. FIRST CORE provides critical funding to expand FIRST’s Community and Capacity Building Program (CCB), which focuses on developing incident response capabilities in regions where resources are limited.

CORE’s goals are to foster community; improve operational capacity across the globe, build resilience across the digital ecosystem, and empower incident responders and their teams.

The idea behind CORE is pretty simple.

Instead of looking for funding for individual projects, FIRST looks for funding to cover an entire work program. This can be difficult, as funders tend to want to know what their money will be used for.

With CORE being based on FIRST's long history of education, training, and knowledge sharing, we can point directly at successes as examples of what we will be funding.

The inaugural sponsor for CORE is Fortinet and since the announcement the funding has been used for to support our collaboration with the Women of FIRST (WoF) SIG to deliver a TTX alongside the UN OEWG process, subsidize delivery of FIRST trainings, and will help kick off a second phase of the A4 project.

And we are always looking for new funders to add to the pool, because while the initial contribution is generous, this is ongoing work that needs to be maintained.

FIRST is about security and the perils we all face are not going away. In many cases they are growing. CORE’s overarching purpose, as it is with the CCB team, is to ensure that no team is left behind. Increasing the capability of smaller teams also increases the strength of interconnected teams and countries.

This is why the CORE workstream will continue to focus on developing new training content, running fellowship programs, establishing networks of regional liaisons and mentors, and offering subsidized training. Because CORE is about creating more security teams with more capabilities at their fingertips and in turn, securing the people who look to us all for help.