WARP Newsletter 1 - July 2006

WARPLOG Issue 1 - July 2006
Welcome to the first issue of this occasional newsletter, in which you will hear
about the long awaited IAAC WARPs Audit Report, the latest WARPs, the website,
international developments, and other work of interest to those who are Serious about
WARPs.
This newsletter is issued via a list-server, to which your email details have
been added due to your previous expressions of interest or involvement with WARPs.
If you don’t want to receive these newsletters, please remove yourself from the
list by simply sending an e-mail to .
Anyone is free to join the list, and we will not pass your details to any commercial
organisation, nor use it for any purpose not connected with WARPs. The list is not
open for anyone else to post notices, so if you have some news or information of
interest to WARPs, please send it to and we will include it in
future newsletters as appropriate.

2nd Annual WARPs Forum

For those of you who missed the event, a report, with pictures and a few PPTs is still
planned for posting on the WARP website. Unfortunately some staff moves and
conflicting priorities mean that this is till not ready :-(( but we are promised it will be
here soon. Yet again the event was enjoyed by (almost) everyone it seems, and all
(except one delegate) said they’d like to attend again next year. We have debated the
format, and it will change again next year, but we’re still open to more ideas, and we
are seriously considering hosting it outside London next time (a venue in Leeds is
being checked out currently).

If you have views on that, and suggestions or offers fora venue, please contact us soon, as we want to get the date fixed in diaries well ahead this time, but it will probably be Mid-March again anyway. It is evident that a few delegates were not as familiar with WARPs as the majority, and it has always been a dilemma whether to focus on advanced topics at the expense of the basics. We are thinking about a beginner’s stream next year as well as focusing on the more nitty-gritty issues, so again any views you have will be most welcome.

It will still be a practitioner-focused event however, and we will be calling on operational and developing WARPs to do their stuff again. Of course, this year we were very fortunate to have Alan Paller, Director of SANS (www.sans.org) as our keynote speaker. He did this entirely at his own expense because he is a supporter of the WARP programme, and is actively trying to convince our US neighbours of the benefits of WARPs. Alan’s performance at the Forum was outstanding of course, and the feedback certainly reflects that, which creates a big challenge for next year; as usual, ideas welcome.

International Developments

Some of you will be aware of ENISA (www.enisa.eu.int), the EU’s Network and
Information Security Agency, set up to be a centre of excellence for the EU. We were
very pleased to have Mehis Hakkaja of ENISA at the Forum, but that wasn’t ENISA’s
first involvement with WARPs. ENISA have a work-stream studying and promoting
CERTs and related initiatives in Europe, and of course that includes WARPs. You
can now read a very interesting article contrasting the two models in their March 2006
Newsletter at http://www.enisa.eu.int/doc/pdf/publications/enisa_quarterly_03_06.pdf
on page 7. Highly recommended, and it should perhaps be read in conjunction with
Andrew Cormack’s article in the UKERNA newsletter at
http://www.ja.net/services/publications/ukerna-news/2005/news33.pdf on page 7. [As
both of those Newsletters are very large files, you may want to read just the articles
themselves in the WARP Toolbox at http://www.warp.gov.uk/Marketing.htm#S31 .]
We also attracted delegates from Lithuania, Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland to
the Forum. The latter are studying various information-sharing models, and their
conclusions will no doubt be well researched and interesting (I’ll let you know when
they emerge).

The Netherlands are serious about running some pilot WARPs soon, with Government backing, and again I’ll update you on this when appropriate. Lithuania are studying the WARP model partly as an alternative/addition to establishing the more expensive CERT model, as are several other newer members of the EU. There is interest in many other countries too, but I’ll wait until those birds are in the hand, so to speak, before saying any more, (but watch out for NZ).

Website Development

Anyone who has been involved with WARPs over the last 3 or 4 years will know
what a useful resource the WARP Toolbox (www.warp.gov.uk) is, and will also have
seen it grow to the stage that it is now so comprehensive that it is sometimes difficult
to find exactly what you want in it. We are therefore in the process of redesigning it,
to divide the contents into 3 main areas.
These are:

• an introductory section (what is a WARP? etc);
• the Toolbox section (how to set one up etc), and
• the detailed stuff about the FWA software, (which might even migrate to a
  separate site in due course).

Naturally this will take longer than we expect (like any good IT project), but I’m sure it will prove worth waiting for. Once again, any suggestions for (modest) improvements to the website will be appreciated.

WARPs Audit

Talking of waiting a long time for things, you may be pleased to know that in the
early days of WARPs, we commissioned an independent study by IAAC
(www.iaac.org) of the development of the first two ‘pilot’ WARPs (LCWARP &
SKWARP), to see what lessons we could learn. We have certainly learnt plenty, and
still are, but one lesson was, that such a report takes a very long time to produce and
approve.

This Audit report is now finally agreed with all parties, and is available on the WARP website IAAC WARP Audit. I hope you find it useful (those of you who like that sort of thing), but please bear in mind that it relates to a specific early period in WARP development (up to Spring 2004), and things have moved on a long way since then, and many of the lessons have already been implemented in both those and in later WARPs.

New WARPs

I am very pleased to welcome the latest WARPs to register, and there are more on the
way. There is still a growing take-up in the Local Government sector, which is set to
continue increasing, but we are also particularly pleased to welcome our second
WARP in the Voluntary sector - RAYWARP, and the first Schools WARP – DSWARP. I hope this is the start of a rapid establishment of the WARP idea in schools, which is an area where they can surely be of great benefit.

Please let us know what you think about these issues, this newsletter, and the WARP
programme in general, even if only by unsubscribing, or encouraging your colleagues
to sign up for this (simply e-mail ).

Thanks
Peter B
Head of Information Sharing, NISCC

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