CESNET Forensic Laboratory celebrates ten years

Prague, 22 June 2021. Ten years ago the Forensic Laboratory of CESNET (FLAB) was established to support the CESNET-CERTS security team in the field of critical security incident analysis. In addition to analytical work, it offers services aimed at preventing such incidents.

The Forensic Laboratory provides services primarily to the CESNET-CERTS security team and CESNET members, but also offers any available capacity to other interested parties. In the ten years of the lab’s existence, its experts have performed 36 analyses, 54 penetration and stress tests, 12 social engineering tests and countless additional activities including consulting.

Among FLAB’s most utilized services are penetration tests that simulate the activities of real cyber attackers and focus on finding vulnerabilities in customers’ technical equipment. The results are then used to implement corrective measures and improvements to the customer’s systems. A stress testing service simulating denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on customer systems provides clients with information about the load their systems can withstand.

Another service is social engineering tests, which no longer target technical equipment but its users and administrators. “Each person has an individual resistance to psychological pressure and is able to refuse to perform activities or provide information requested by an attacker to a certain extent. With social engineering tests, the resilience of an organisation’s employees can be quantified and at the same time the employees can be trained by practical demonstration to increase their resilience. So when they encounter attempts by real attackers – for example, phishing authors – they will be better prepared,” said Aleš Padrta, head of CESNET’s Forensics Lab.

FLAB also offers a range of additional services and is known for its training programmes. Among the most notable are The Catch competition or the popular forensic training. As part of its consulting activities, the lab’s staff also handles deleted data recovery, consults on various security issues, and imparts its knowledge at a number of conferences and seminars.

To learn more, visit the CESNET Forensics Lab website.

CESNET was founded in 1996 by universities and the Czech Academy of Sciences. It is engaged in research and development of information and communication technologies, building and developing a national CESNET e-infrastructure for research and education. Thanks to its research activities and achievements, it represents the Czech Republic in important international projects, especially in building the pan-European network GÉANT or grid projects (EGI.eu), and participates actively in their implementation. The association is also working on the use of high-speed networks for sharing multimedia data, both synchronously in the form of video conferencing and shared applications, and asynchronously in the form of streaming. Since December 2020, CESNET represents the Czech Republic in the international association dealing with the open science paradigm – EOSC AISBL.
More at: www.cesnet.cz