September 18 th , 2019 – At FIRST we strongly believe that in order to build a global cybersecurity incident response community, from which every company or user participating in the Internet can benefit, we should all work to limit the impact of sanctions or export regulations on incident responders. This includes being a forum where technology corporations such as Huawei, have the ability to participate the same as others.

The reliability and security of today’s internet is rooted in security professionals around the world, and across industries and companies, cooperating across borders and even between competitors on a daily basis to mitigate the impact of security incidents. When regulation directly affects this ability to cooperate, the stability and security of the Internet can be placed at risk. Key cooperative processes such as the sale of medicine, intellectual property rights protection, search and rescue, and many others, are often explicitly permitted through explicit approvals or licenses, despite sanctions or export regulations being in place. FIRST encourages policymakers to find similar exemptions for cybersecurity, to enable the truly global incident response capability, which we and other organizations represent.

After extensive consultation and review of changes made to the US Export Administration Regulations (EAR), we regret ending up in a position where we had to suspend Huawei's membership in order to ensure we meet these evolving regulations. In order to achieve our goals, we intend to work closely with both Huawei and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to address any concerns related to their participation in FIRST.

Addendum. As of 15th October, the decision was made by the FIRST board to temporarily suspend two further members Duhau and HikVision until further notice. The aforementioned statement still stands for the reasoning behind this suspension.

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About FIRST

Founded in 1990, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) consists of internet emergency response teams from more than 490 corporations, government bodies, universities and other institutions across 92 countries in the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania. It promotes cooperation among computer security incident response teams. For more information, visit: https://www.first.org.

Email: press@first.org