FIRe: Firefox for Computer Security Incident Reporting and Coordination

Information Security breaches are on the increase and adversaries are regularly coming up with new tools and techniques to compromise the information infrastructure. Effective incident information sharing and coordination during incident resolution is crucial for thwarting the cyber attack and protecting the critical assets of organization and nation. It is observed from the current means and methods employed by various national Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRT) and Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISAC) that there is need for improvement in the incident reporting and coordination means & methods, relaying only few available means like unsecured email communication is insufficient in countering cyber attacks. FIRe (Firefox for Incident Reporting) is developed to provide reporting organization, a single window solution for incident reporting & coordination activities with CSIRTs (National & Sectoral) during incident resolution process. FIRe is a customized Firefox browser with extensions developed to enable the organizations to share the incident information in standardize format with the national and/or sectoral CSIRTs. FIRe provides the functionalities to communicate & coordinate during the incident resolution. FIRe also integrated tools for secure communication, sensitive information labeling, real time interaction with handler & analyst and database of stakeholder point of contacts. Operational testing of FIRe is planned in upcoming national cyber security exercise 2015 to be conducted by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). Learning's of exercise and feedback of participating organizations with respect to FIRe will be used for improving the tool.