Cyber-attacks cost companies 400 billion dollars every year. The global market for cyber-crime is greater that the market for marijuana, heroin and cocaine combined , and it has adversely affected more than 88% of Europeans.

The more we embrace ICT systems in our organizations, government and every aspect of our daily life, the more we open ourselves up to a new breed of attackers. The problem becomes even greater as our dependency on ICT systems tends to become absolute, while their complexity is ever increasing. To manage the cyber security risks organizations often work mostly in isolation, with limited interactions with others. There are a number of reasons for this; most importantly organizations are hesitant to share data and incidents. Even when they are willing to share, there exist practical difficulties in sharing (in some cases enormous amounts of data, heterogeneity of data and formats etc.). All this, combined with the fact that attackers are very agile and become increasingly smarter leave organizations with a difficulty to counter emerging and future threats. Moreover, even though large corporations or countries may have the resources to allocate to build up their security posture, smaller companies (SME), public organization, and small countries are left vulnerable. The information security industry has been steadily raising their concerns, and calling for more close collaboration to fight cyber threats. It is important to note, that companies such as Cisco just added their voice to the calls for real-time information sharing.

The results of this cooperation  will allow ICT related organization and ICT enabled enterprises to focus on their real targets products and services that they offer to citizens. There are enterprises (e.g. SMEs) that they do not have the effort in cost and man power to provide the needed security assurance guarantees to their systems thus making them more vulnerable to attackers than large enterprises who have the capacity to deal with cyber-attacks. This, in turn, will have significant impact on the quality of the services/products offered.

Moreover a well-established CERT and especially a network of CERTs in Europe has direct impact into an increased level of trust, reducing the overall financial cost and save more time for the enterprises to invest in new ideas, new services and products to offer. This is purely translated in economic growth and prosperity in a national and European level.