Cybercrimes: create a body that will alert when national security is compromised

The National Cybersecurity Directorate created last week the National Center for Computer Incident Response (CERT), with the aim of alerting official institutions and organizations that handle critical national security issues about cyberattacks.

Computer attacks became one of the stars of topics related to technological-political news during 2020, the year of the coronavirus pandemic. The case of the hacking of the National Migration Directorate was the most resounding, at the end of August. For this reason, the objective of the management led by Gustavo Sain is for there to be an entity that alerts and warns when this may happen.

According to the Official Gazette, it has “the objective of coordinating the management of security incidents at the national level and providing assistance in those that affect the entities and jurisdictions of the National Public Sector”.

But in addition to alerting about possible attacks and breachs (threats, leaks), the body will have other functions, above all, problem solving. This is the list of topics they will cover:

• Administer and manage all the information on reports of security incidents in the entities and jurisdictions of the National Public Sector defined in subsection a) of article 8 of Law No. 24,156 and its amendments.

• Provide technical advice on security incidents in computer systems reported by the entities and jurisdictions listed in article 1 of this measure.

• Coordinate the actions to follow, in the event of security incidents, with other programs and incident response teams of the Argentine Republic.

• Contribute to increasing the capacity to prevent, alert, detect and recover from computer security incidents that may affect critical information assets in the country.

• Interact and cooperate with teams of a similar nature from other countries.

• Keep a record of statistics and establish metrics at the national level.

• Coordinate the management of computer security incidents that affect critical resources at the national level
  
• Promote the formation of prevention, detection, alert and recovery capacities to respond to computer security incidents.

• Cooperate with the provincial governments and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires in the management of computer security incidents.

The National Cybersecurity Directorate depends on the Ministry of Public Innovation, which is the one that created the application Look after and it aims to advance in an area that did not have many resources: until 2020 “it had few personnel and was dependent on Arsat,” according to the newspaper La Nación.

It is likely to be a step forward in stopping one of the problems that, far from getting better, is getting worse and worse: cybercrime, which even has its “star” criminals.

The document, in the Official Gazette

SL