Telecom security in the EU: ENISA hosts a productive 26th meeting of Article 13a Expert Group

More than 30 experts from telecom regulators and supervisory authorities of 19 EU and EFTA countries, the European Commission and ENISA, discussed cross-cutting telecom security issues.

Highlights of the workshop include ENISA’s presentation of the new visual analysis tool, which allows stakeholders to analyse the incident reports of the last several years. In addition, the Hungarian NRA gave an overview and a demo of possible tools for proactive detection of outages; the Dutch Telecom Authority led a working discussion on outage caused by power cuts, looking in detail at scenarios and measures.

Moreover, the Maltese Telecom Authority initiated a work stream to develop a common, EU wide, model for deriving national incident reporting thresholds, with a view to the upcoming new European Electronic Communications Code (EECC).

Finally, the European Commission updated the group on the status of EECC, which is due to be adopted before the end of the year, while ENISA presented the results of two deep-dive analysis into BGP security and 5G slicing security.

This series of meetings, held three times per year, gives experts from across the EU the opportunity to discuss telecom security issues and their supervision activities. An important goal of this expert group is to exchange experience and ideas, to support a harmonised approach across the EU’s telecom sector.

Background information

The upcoming new EECC aims to align the security requirements in the EU telecom regulation with the NIS directive, and to extend the scope of EU telecom regulation. It provides the basis for a strong partnership and collaboration between different stakeholders across the EU i.e. authorities implementing the NIS Directive, telecom regulatory authorities, and the private sector. This partnership will be important to address new and emerging challenges in the EU’s telecom landscape, like the deployment of IoT and the rollout of 5G technology.

The Article 13a Expert Group was set up almost 10 years ago by ENISA, under the auspices of the European Commission, to agree on a harmonised implementation of Article 13a of the Telecom Framework Directive. This expert 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 experiences and 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/