Service Awareness and Usage Rate

The "e-Newsletter Subscriber -TWCERT Alliance Members" have a higher awareness of various services, especially in "information security information sharing", "information security awareness promotion," and "information security incident notification and assistance", which have over 90% awareness. The " e-Newsletter Subscriber -TWCERT Alliance Members " also have a higher usage rate of all services. It can be observed that the consortium members are the stakeholders who have more frequent interaction with TWCERT/CC.

Service Helpfulness and Reasons

For the service value, 86.7% of the respondents rated "information sharing" as helpful. A total of 83.1% of respondents rated the service as helpful for "information security awareness promotion". Among the "product vulnerability reports", 50% of the respondents thought the service was helpful. 50% of respondents thought "information security incident notification" was helpful. For "phishing notification", 45.8% said the service was helpful. The overall level of helpfulness of the "malicious file detection service" was nearly 70%.

Expectations and Preferences for Training Courses

Nearly 90% of the respondents expected "downloadable presentations of forum or course contents", 70% expected "more Chinese speaking lecturers or real-time translation services", and 26.4% expected "more foreign speakers to be invited" for TWCERT/CC forum meetings or educational training contents.

Information Service

The overall attention score for the messages posted by TWCERT/CC was 3.8, with 23.6% always concerned, 40% often concerned, and 44.8% occasionally concerned. The highest percentage of Internet issues respondents were interested in was "information security threats and defense trends" (95.4%). Nearly 80% of the respondents wanted to know more about "information security processes and practices", and 70% wanted to know more about "the latest information security standards".

Impact of COVID-19

In the past three months, 10% of the respondents' companies/organizations were affected in terms of information security needs or protection methods. Most of the respondents mentioned that they have immediate needs for information asset protection in their home or remote offices, and that remote (non-company) office environments may become information security vulnerabilities during the epidemic due to the derivation of information security issues and the lack of awareness of information security among employees. In addition to education and training for personnel to enhance their knowledge, practical protection such as employee identity authentication, anti-virus software application and protection means are also important during the epidemic.

Expectations and Recommendations

The respondents hoped TWNIC or TWCERT/CC could "provide more services/information" (16.7%). In terms of information provision, some respondents mentioned that they hope TWNIC or TWCERT/CC can continue to provide information related to information security, restore the previous full content PDF file of the e-newsletter, expect the information to be transparent and open, enhance usability, and improve the efficiency of intelligence disclosure. After the notification, we hope to provide quicker and more accurate assistance to deal with the information security crisis as soon as possible. For services, respondents hoped TWNIC or TWCERT/CC could provide more Internet defense technology or provide more guidance and advice on network protection. After notification, they hoped that case follow-ups could be faster and more precise to help deal with the information security crisis as soon as possible.

The interviewees have acknowledged the events and the info-sharing activities. They expect more efficient notification by making good use of a variety of platforms.

TWNIC has received good reviews from alliance members three years in a row. The events and info-sharing activities are fairly helpful. The events were organized with meticulous efforts and a rich variety of topics. The information is clear and timely updated with diverse methods. In addition to notification, newsletter and website announcement, stakeholders would also like to be notified by using API directly. This shows even if the notification has the same information, the platform it's delivered and the level of disclosure mean differently for stakeholders. Therefore, if TWNIC can share information based on different platform's features, it will be more efficient for users to learn, handle and make use of it.

The alliance members also think TWCERT/CC provides a lot of information covering a wide range of topics, but it needs to be more careful about the accuracy and timeliness.

Add incident status inquiry or notification, increase effectiveness of cross-country incident reporting

Stakeholders think the domestic incident reporting and subsequent handling process is fairly smooth but cross-country reporting/handling is not as satisfactory. Based on their experience, since the incident was labelled as other countries, it took a very long time for inappropriate content to be removed and there was no way for them to know how the incident was handled afterwards. Besides, they'd also like to have an incident status inquiry function and to be notified timely, so that the reporter can learn about the incident status and become more willing to report incidents.

Take industry requirements/gaps into consideration and deploy services to assist

Stakeholders think TWCERT/CC serves as the bridge of communication between the government and the private sector; therefore, they project their industry requirements onto expectations for TWCERT/CC, wishing TWCERT/CC to help them understand industry trends and formulate specifications/standards. Besides giving an evaluation on how to assist the industries with their requirement gaps, it's more important for TWCERT/CC to make sure these industries understand their role/position/missions.

Stakeholders also suggested that TWCERT/CC should take advantage of Taiwan's flourishing high-tech industry and build up the industry's vulnerability database. TWCERT/CC should leverage its neutral role and collect industry-specific/product-specific security experiences, so as to enhance Taiwan's security protection capacities and create its own cyber defense features.

Improve online tech training results and continue to put efforts in segmented security education

Even though stakeholders said they don't think COVID-19 has affected how they interact with TWNIC, we cannot neglect that they pointed out online tech training results should be improved. As hands-on training classes produce more fruitful learning results, shifting to online classes certainly has impact on the learning model. Therefore, they look forward to a better way for training classes to proceed.

Stakeholders also have given positive recognition to the information section on the official website. Although alliance members aren't likely to use it often, they must have used it to inform the general public whether in the form of security education or raising security awareness. In addition to continuously providing security information, making persistent efforts in providing security education to the general public also helps the society well-prepared for security incidents.