WARP News (February 2006)

Welcome to the fifth release of the WARP Toolbox (February 2006), if you wish to view previous news from the Toolbox visit News archive. The following news items provide an update on the progress of the WARP programme:

• There are now twelve Registered WARPs who have signed up to the WARP Code of Practice and have been approved by NISCC. These include three in Local Government, a Genealogy WARP within the voluntary sector, a Security Consultants WARP, a Home User WARP, two WARPs for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), a WARP for the Police Forces, one for emergency services and two WARPs in the private sector- see the WARP Register for details.

• This release 5 of the Toolbox has been scheduled to coincide with the second official WARPs Forum entitled 'Serious about WARPs'. This is to be held on the 15 March 2006 in Central London involving existing WARP providers and operators, as well as those in the process of setting up WARPs or seriously thinking about doing so. Details of the proceedings will be published here shortly after the event.

• A WARP Operators forum has been setup with agreed terms of reference and an elected chair from amongst the WARP Operators; for the first year this is SKWARP warp@kent.gov.uk ; three quarterly meetings have been held so far.

• The Filtered Warnings Application (FWA) software v4.1 has now passed Beta testing and all existing users have upgraded to this new version. All new WARPs requiring FWA will be provided with this new version. Work is also under way to standardise an XML format for WARP advisories which can help with data transfer beyond the FWA users.

• WARPs continue to attract international interest from the Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Spain and the US.
• WARPs are also now an established element of the appropriate work programme of ENISA the European Network and Information Security Agency http://www.enisa.eu.int/

What's new in the Toolbox

The main changes to this Toolbox release are as follows:

• The WARP Register has been updated and now describes 12 approved WARPs. The Register also now indicates which WARPs are using the FWA software to encourage Peer-to-Peer working through FWA.

• The Business case section has been updated with a new costings section including a spreadsheet and case study WARP application showing reduced costs in setting up a WARP.

• Case studies from MYSWARP have been included to help with setting up a WARP; a Business Case is included in the Business case section, and a Security Policy and Services Agreement in the Service development section.

• The Marketing section has been updated to include the generic CSIA 2005 roadshow WARP PPT presentation and two logos which should be used on WARP Operator websites.

• There is new material under the Governance section relating to work that NISCC has sponsored on Trust. This work is being taken forward some practical Trust-building tools later this year.

• There is now a comprehensive Operations Guide within the WARP services filtered warnings description. NB that the training movies still relate to the previous beta version FWA v4.0. These have been retained in the Toolbox as they still give a good indication of how the software works, but will be updated in due course.

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