Employees of the Chair of Information Technology Security of the National Aviation University together with Gleb Pakharenko, the Information Security Manager of “Infopulse Ukraine”, one of the leading IT companies, and Konstantin Korsun, one of the former heads of the computer crime department of the Security Service of Ukraine, are initiating creation of the first university team that would respond to security incidents. The National Aviation University (NAU) was the first ready and willing institution to take part in the project.

It is an open secret that the number of cybercrimes is increasing in Ukraine as well as in many other countries of the world. Despite the lack of accurate statistics about cybercrime rate in Ukraine, everyone knows how risky, for example, it is to use bank cards to pay online. But the bank cards issue is only the top of the cybercrimes iceberg the whole world is facing in the context of globalization.

“Cybercrime is similar to global warming; you cannot fight it regionally, it is necessary to use common efforts.” — says Gleb Pakharenko. — “And Ukraine with its European ambitions cannot avoid these problems, that is why CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) was created on the basis of the National Aviation University, the  primary goal of which is to coordinate measures of efficient counteraction to unauthorized actions within the computer networks of NAU.

It is the global character of technical facilities of cybercrimes and their accessibility, which determines specific characteristics of this type of crimes:

• high efficiency of cyber attacks, which consequences can have global character;
• spatial indeterminacy of the cyber attack source;
• time uncertainty and discrepancy between the actual time of attack and the process of its preparation;
• possibility of organization of complex cyber attacks, which come from different directions and are simultaneously aimed at various information systems;
• anonymity of crime (in order to commit an illegal act, an intruder does not have to cross country borders and be directly at the scene of the crime)
• reduction of the level of moral coercion upon a subject of a cyber attack, which is connected with spatiotemporal remoteness from the object of cyber attack (struggle of subjects of cyber attacks takes place in virtual cyberspace);
• availability of technical facilities, necessary for the perpetration of a crime (in the majority of cases, the only thing needed is a computer  with access to the data system);
• cybercrime acts are committed by people with high intellectual potential.

Therefore, cybercrime can be defined as an employment of certain methods, which are aimed at security derogation or endangering safety characteristics of information systems resources by using their exposures. CERT has been created to ensure a certain level of safety of information systems resources.

The choice of the university was not accidental. There is everything you need there: numerous computer networks, broadband internet access and talented people. Other higher educational establishments are planned to involve in this project in the near future; and the regular incidents data exchange, statistics as well as the best practices of current issues prevention will be set up. The USA, Europe and many other countries did it that way; commercial organizations capable of solving serious issues in IT sphere and of interacting as a whole with similar teams from other countries were established on the basis of CERT educational institutions.