Cyber firefighters, Germany needs you! Firms asked to volunteer staff

Little benefit, lots of risks means cyberfeuerwehr is probably a non-starter.

Glyn Moody – Oct 7, 2016 1:40 pm | 9

The German government plans to ask local companies to lend some of their IT experts for up to 20 days a year as part of a volunteer “cyber-firefighting” service.

They would join “Mobile Incident Response Teams” managed by Germany’s federal office for information security.

The cyberfeuerwehr (which translates as cyber fire department) idea is modelled on the country’s real firefighters, 95 percent of whom are volunteers according to an article in the German newspaper Die Zeit, which obtained a draft of the contract that companies joining the new computer security scheme would sign.

The government would not pay the “cyber-firefighters” for their help in dealing with an incident, although it would cover basic expenses. Instead, IT staff would continue to receive a salary from their employer. In return, those companies volunteering experts would be given access to information about the attacks that their staff help to tackle. The idea seems to be that this would help them to protect themselves against similar attacks in the future.

However, the victim of the attack would be able to withhold that information if it wishes, which seems likely, since it would hardly wanted it made public. Equally, government officials may not choose to reveal all details of the attack to the company affected. That could lead to the situation where the victim company knows less than another whose IT experts helped deal with the problem.

Die Zeit points out that another complication is the risk that the volunteers might take the opportunity to gain information about competitors when they go in as part of a response team. In the current draft, there are no penalties if they do so.

The whole scheme seems ill-thought through, as if it were put together by someone who had little understanding of how computer security incidents were dealt with in practice, but assumed it was like fighting physical fires.

The main impetus behind the move seems to be to come up with a response team for dealing with computer attacks on the cheap, with industry bearing most of the burden for little benefit. Without significant industry support, the draft will probably remain just that.