CERT.org Goes Away, Panic Ensues

When a major security-based website goes away, people notice and often assume the worst. So while the Carnegie Mellon Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT)'s stand-alone website recently was removed, it caused some confusion. It turns out the CERT remains in operation.

A blog post by Risk Based Security reflected the uncertainty that ensued in the wake of the recent disappearance of the cert.org site. The confusion began after a tweet by a CERT employee that the website had been removed. Risk Based Security then found that the content of cert.org had folded into the Software Engineering Institute website at Carnegie Mellon. It seemed ominous that typing in the former CERT URL took visitors not to the CERT site, but to the site of the SEI.

"The important thing is that this [website change] doesn't portend anything about CERT itself," a CERT spoksperson said, adding that the work of CERT is more important than ever.

All of the information formerly found at cert.org - from blog posts to podcasts to research reports - is available at www.sei.cmu.edu, and CERT's knowledge base of security issues remains accessible under its traditional URL, https://kb.cert.org.

CERT announced the changes in late January, he said. "We put banners on most of the main websites, and on the blog and resource library and other sites, we put splashes up about a month in advice. We gave a link to preview the new site well ahead of the launch," the spokesperson said. "We were managing a large number of external Web properties. These were two of the largest and for a variety of organizational reasons we decided to combine them," he said.

Read more here and here.

Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop ITX. Learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop ITX 2018 agenda here.

Related Content: