SecureWorks Inducted into FIRST, the Elite Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams

ATLANTA, GA, October 17, 2005 - SecureWorks, named by the IT analyst firm Yankee Group as a “Market Leader” among Pure Managed Security Service Providers (PMSSPs), has been inducted as a member into FIRST, the very exclusive Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams.

FIRST is the premier organization and recognized global leader in incident response. FIRST brings together a variety of computer security incident response teams from government, commercial, and educational organizations. FIRST aims to foster cooperation and coordination in incident prevention, to stimulate rapid reaction to incidents, and to promote information sharing among members and the community at large.

SecureWorks recently completed an extensive application process and was approved for membership by the FIRST Steering Committee. “We are honored to be a member of this elite organization,” said Jon Ramsey, SecureWorks’ CTO. “Being accepted into FIRST exemplifies our security team’s outstanding capabilities in the areas of research, intrusion prevention, vulnerability assessment and reporting.

“As a member of FIRST, we will be able to work hand in hand with many of the very best security incident response teams from around the world,” continued Ramsey. “These affiliations can only enhance our research capabilities, which in turn enables us to provide better protection for our clients and for the Internet in general, as we share our findings with our fellow FIRST members.”

“We were happy to sponsor SecureWorks' membership in FIRST, and we welcome their participation,” said Jeff Carpenter, Technical Manager of the CERT Coordination Center

Membership in FIRST enables incident response teams to more effectively respond to security incidents - reactive as well as proactive. In addition to the trust network that FIRST forms in the global incident response community, FIRST also provides value added services, including access to up-to-date best practice documents, technical colloquia for security experts, hands-on-classes, an annual incident response conference, publications and web services, and special interest groups.

About FIRST

FIRST is the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams. The idea of FIRST goes back to 1989, only one year after the first CERT was created after the infamous Internet worm. Even at that time, incidents were impacting not only one closed user group or organization, but any number of networks interconnected by the Internet.

It was clear from then on that information exchange and cooperation on issues of mutual interest, like new vulnerabilities or wide ranging attacks - especially on a core system like the DNS servers or the Internet as a critical infrastructure itself - were the key issues for security and incident response teams.

Since 1990, when FIRST was founded, its members have resolved an almost continuous stream of security-related attacks and incidents, including handling 1000s of security vulnerabilities affecting nearly all of the millions of computer systems and networks throughout the world connected by the ever-growing Internet.

FIRST brings together a wide variety of security and incident response teams, especially product security teams from the government, commercial, and academic sectors.

About SecureWorks

SecureWorks, a Managed Security Service company, protects corporate networks, servers, and email environments. SecureWorks is the only service that prevents network intrusions at the perimeter, firewall and host levels; monitors client networks 24 x7x 365; provides ongoing vulnerability assessments; and protects email from spam and viruses while automatically encrypting email to protect confidential information. SecureWorks serves over 1,200 enterprise customers, including banks, utilities, credit unions, and hospitals. For more information, visit www.secureworks.com.

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Media contacts

Elizabeth W. Clarke
SecureWorks
404-486-4492