ENISA holds Article 13a expert group meeting

The meeting was hosted by RTR – the Telecom regulator of Austria – and was joined by experts from ENISA, the European Commission, and experts from national telecom regulators from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. Additionally, experts from the telecom regulators of Norway and Switzerland participated in the event. 

Article 13a meetings are normally only for national regulatory authorities, but this meeting was extended with a first day, open for both telecom providers and regulators. The first day was attended by experts from the regulators, as well as from telecom providers and vendors such as A1 Austria, Telenor, Vodafone, Tele2, Positive Technologies, GSMA, ETNO and ECTA, and others.           

The participants discussed telecom security topics like the Commission proposal for a new EU Electronic Telecommunications Code, secure ICT procurement, SS7 and signalling security, Network Function Virtualization security, and security policy and risk.

The second day of the event was reserved for discussions between telecom regulators only. The group covered the annual incident reporting (which happens yearly as part of Article 13a of the EU’s Telecom Framework directive), scenario thinking and security measures. The group also discussed about the issue of port blocking and net neutrality, and the link with this telecom security expert group (vis-à-vis the EU Member States Cooperation group that was set up under the new NIS directive). 

Background information         

The Article 13a Expert Group was set up by ENISA, under the auspices of the European Commission, to agree on a harmonised implementation of Article 13a of the Telecom Framework Directive. The group discusses about how to implement security incident reporting (nationally and across the EU) and how to supervise security measures in the telecom sector. The group also exchanges lessons learned about major incidents affecting electronic communications networks and services.

The work of the Article 13a Expert Group is explained in a short video.

For more information: http://resilience.enisa.europa.eu/article-13/.