Public Resource

There are absolutely free resources for incident management and have the following advantages.

1. They are inexpensive or free.
2. They are a resource to a large number of entities making them knowledgeable on the statistics of incidents. This gives them a global scope of the problem making it easier to point to the origination of the incident.
3. Advisories are across the board to all who subscribe helping to solve the problem quickly on a global scale.

Disadvantages of a Public Resource are as follows.

1. They are not specific to your infrastructure needs. They do not provide hands on site assistance to solve your incident.
2. The incident teams are publicly and privately funded. The question of whether or not to deploy an incident team is up to the funder.

The most widely recognized Public Resources for incident response is Carnegie Mellon's CERT. This is a publicly funded organization through the Department of Defense. CERT/CC is Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center. Every incident has a CERT number in a database maintained by CERT.

Another Public Resource is the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST). This is a conglomeration of several Incident Response Teams representing specific industries and entities. Follow the link below to the list of IRT's associated with FIRST.

FIRST members