29th Article 13a telecom security meeting in Belgrade

The meeting was opened by Mr. Vladica Tintor, Director of RATEL, who gave an overview of the structure and activities of RATEL. Jovan Milosavljevic gave a great talk on the work of the National Centre for the Prevention of Security Risks in ICT systems, i.e. the national CSIRT, how they work, how breach reporting is set up and what the current priorities are, etc. The national CSIRT is a part of RATEL.

The meeting proceeded with liaison statements from related groups like the NIS Cooperation Group, and the NIS CG work streams on digital services and digital infrastructure. ENISA presented its paper on Security Supervision under the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), which is due to be published in December. The EECC expands the telecom security provisions in Article 13a of the Framework directive and will cover also so-called Over-the-top providers of communications services.

At the end of the day ENISA opened discussions about a number of challenges, which will have to be addressed by the group going forward under the new legislative framework, such as the new definition of security in the EECC, the new reporting parameters in the EECC and the new ENISA tool for EECC breach reporting CIRAS (Cyber Incident Reporting and Analysis System). As a social event offered by RATEL the group paid a visit to the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade. Tesla was the first to envisage and develop wireless/radio communication technology and he foresaw that indeed such communication technology would drastically change the world.

On the second day, each country gave an update on their state of play and relevant recent incidents. ENISA presented a plan and timeline for updating the Article 13a security framework, which needs adaptation for the EECC. BEREC presented the results of its survey on 5G auctions. BAKOM, the telecom regulator of Switzerland, gave an overview of its work on power outages and their impact on telecom networks.

The Article 13a group will change name and, where needed, membership, to adapt to the new legislation, the EECC. In 2020, much of the work of the group will be dedicated to updating the guidelines for security measures and to adapt the incident reporting process to the new provisions.

If you like to know more about this work, or if you want to join our telecom security mailing lists to be kept up to date about our telecom security work or to receive invitations for future telecom security meetings, please contact us via resilience@enisa.europa.eu 

Background

• This work is done under ENISA's Annual work program output O.1.2.3 “Supporting incident reporting activities in the EU”
• The ENISA Article 13a expert group was set up in 2010. There have been 29 meetings so far. The next meeting will be held on 12, 13 February 2020 in Brussels and the first day, 12 February, will be open for experts from the sector (operators, telecom vendors/suppliers, telecom security consultancies, etc).
• The guidelines of the Article 13a group can be found on the ENISA Article 13a expert group portal

For further queries:

Please contact press@enisa.europa.eu