New forum to guard against hackers

The Infosec Community for Advice, Reporting, Understanding and Sharing (ICARUS) is an attempt to bridge the impasse between technologists and management create a more open information security community.

"It's an extension of the Warning Access and Reporting Point (WARP) system developed by NISCC," said Ross Patel of the British Computer Society (BCS) which is involved in the project. "But NISCC's remit is only the critical national infrastructure, this will extend the program so that everyone benefits."

Members who sign up to the ICARUS program must agree to work together and share information that will hopefully reduce the risk of systems being compromised.

David Lacey, director of information security at Royal Mail, John Meakin, group head of information security at Standard Chartered Bank, and former Presidential and White House advisor Howard Schmidt have all given the scheme their backing.

Services the scheme will offer include a filtered warning service giving categorised threat warnings; advice brokering, using a bulletin board and an anonymous information sharing service.

"By next year this will be the biggest information sharing forum in Europe," said Patel. "This has been attempted before but this time we have the momentum and the direction to make it a success."

www.bcsbrimingham.co.uk