Building the West African CSIRTs Regional Community

Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) play a pivotal role in the cyber ecosystem. CSIRTs are responsible for raising alerts about threats, preventing risks and threats to information systems, reacting to security incidents, and aiding in mitigation.
Synergy among CSIRTs is crucial to the fast and effective detection of attacks. As such, building synergies between the CSIRTs of the ECOWAS region can help to complete the mandate of national CSIRTs by leveraging on each Member States’s strengths and unique perspectives to produce more remarkable results than what could be achieved alone.

The inaugural edition of the ECOWAS CSIRT week in 2021 delivered a ‘Declaration of informal cooperation’ amongst the CSIRTs to engage more in sharing information on organising and managing a CSIRT and on the identification and resolution of incidents.
The second edition of the ECOWAS CSIRT week in 2022 was dedicated to defining a “roadmap for the implementation of the regional Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP)”. Following discussions on both technical and organisational aspects of the regional MISP, Member States agreed that more needs to be accomplished at the national level to pave the way for the development and utilisation of a regional MISP.

The objective of the 2023 Edition of the ECOWAS CSIRT Week is to set the basis of the implementation of the regional cybersecurity coordination centre. This includes elements such as:
– Mission statement of the regional cybersecurity coordination centre
– Stakeholders’ analysis
– Structural organisation
– Key operational infrastructure
– Business plan