In conjunction with the 2008 FIRST annual conference in Vancouver, Canada, the CERT Coordination Center and the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) jointly held the first-ever international competition honoring best practices and advances in safeguarding the security of computer systems and networks. The purpose of the contest was to honor experts worldwide who have developed best practices to prevent cyber attacks or mitigate attacks that are unfolding.

The 2008 contest focused on two fields of security activity—prevention and mitigation—under the banner "Protect," reflecting the first phase of a computer security incident response team's cycle of activity: Protect, Detect, Respond and Sustain. Preventive actions were defined as those that secure and fortify systems and networks, decreasing the chances of an attack against infrastructure. Mitigation involves changing the enterprise infrastructure to contain, eradicate or fix actual or potential malicious activity.

2008 Winners

• TWNCERT Social Engineering Drill: The Best Practice to Protect against Social Engineering Attacks in E-mail Form (pdf)
  Authors: Pei-Wen Liu, Jia-Chyi Wu, Pei-Ching Liu, TWNCERT
• National Spam Threat Management: With Case Studies of Spam Incidents Analysis (pdf)
  Author: Hyukjoon Kim, Spam Response Team at Korea Information Security Agency