Policy and Strategy
The policy and strategy dimension of cybersecurity capacity for Iceland was gauged to range
from start-up to established stages of maturity.
The Republic of Iceland is at an established stage of maturity regarding the National
Cybersecurity Strategy factor. Iceland has published the Icelandic National Cyber Security
Strategy (NCSS) 2015-2026, approved by the Minister of the Interior in April 2015 together
with a three year Plan of Action. The Ministry of the Interior (MoI) was divided into two new
Ministries on 1 May 2017, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and the Ministry of Transport and
Local Government (MoTLG). Since then MoTLG has been the designated coordinating body
with a mandate to work towards the revision and the implementation of the National Cyber
Security Strategy and the Action Plan and has started consulting across public and private
sectors, and with civil society. The NCSS called for the appointment of a special Cyber Security
Council (CSC) for government and public sector representatives and a Cyber Security Forum
with representatives from private sectors in addition to the representatives in the CSC, in
order to address collaboration on cybersecurity topics related to the implementation of the
NCSS in Iceland.
Iceland’s incident response capacity is at a formative to established stage of maturity. CERTIS – Iceland’s national CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response Team) – has been
established with specified roles and responsibilities with emphasis on the electronic
communications market. In particular CERT-IS has the role of national point-of-contact, but
does not at this time handle the Government CERT role. However, negotiations regarding this
role are underway. CERT-IS has developed incident response processes, but these are and will
not be publicly available. However, an incident response plan for Critical Information
Infrastructure (CII) incidents has been published and distributed to members of the
telecommunications sector. An overall central registry of national-level cybersecurity
incidents is not yet operational. CERT-IS records incidents of all levels of severity that are
reported to the group, but handling is prioritized by constituency, severity and impact. The
registry of incidents is, however, not as of yet publicly accessible in any way. The National
Commissioner of the Icelandic Police (NCIP) and CERT-IS aim to cooperate on creating a
classification of national level incidents.
The members of CERT-IS receive training in an ad-hoc manner. Moreover, CERT-IS
collaborates with Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) through
the Nordic National CERT Collaboration (NCC). A Nordic cybersecurity exercise took place in
2015 and assessed the quality of the incident response processes, procedures, interactions,
and information-sharing mechanisms that exist under the NCC Agreement. Additionally,
CERT-IS has good relations with the financial sector and aims to cooperate with a new
collaborative forum, the Nordic Financial CERT.
The protection of critical infrastructure (CI) considerations are at a formative stage of
maturity. A list of general CI assets has been created. The National Commissioner of the
Icelandic Police (NCIP) is responsible for identifying these assets. However, the CI asset audit
list is not disseminated to relevant stakeholders. Currently there is informal and ad-hoc threat
and vulnerability disclosure among CI owners as well as between CI and the government, but
the scope of reporting requirements has not been specified. CI owners have some capacity
6 | Cybersecurity Capacity Review Iceland, 2017
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