Brandefense has joined FIRST, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams, as an Associate. FIRST lists Brandefense CTI as a member since October 22, 2026, with Türkiye as the country. As of October 23, 2026, FIRST’s Associates list holds seven organizations in four countries, and Brandefense is the only one from Türkiye.
This post explains what FIRST is, what an Associate is, and why the membership matters to the people who use our threat intelligence.
What FIRST Is
FIRST is a non-profit organization. Its idea goes back to 1989, and it was founded in 1990. It brings together security and incident response teams, including product security teams from government, commercial and academic organizations. FIRST says it has more than 800 members across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania.
FIRST describes itself as a trust network for the global incident response community. FIRST says it aims to help teams cooperate on incident prevention, react fast to incidents, and share information with members and the wider community.
FIRST also maintains standards that security teams use every day. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System describes how severe a vulnerability is. The Exploit Prediction Scoring System estimates the chance that a published CVE will be exploited in the wild in the next 30 days. The Traffic Light Protocol sets four labels that tell a recipient how far a piece of shared information may travel.
What an Associate Member Is
FIRST has three kinds of membership: Full Members, Associates and Individual Members. Full Members are incident response teams that help a defined constituency prevent and handle security incidents. Associates are organizations that are not operational incident response teams but have a valid interest in the FIRST community.
An Associate membership is organizational and non-voting, and access to member tools is limited. A candidate needs one Full Member as a sponsor, and the application goes through a review by the Secretariat, the Membership Committee and the Board. Brandefense joined through that process.
On the Turkish side, FIRST’s Teams list shows seven teams: a national CERT, two banks, two telecom operators, an airline and an online retailer. With Brandefense CTI on the Associates list, that makes eight Turkish organizations across the two lists.
We want to be exact about this. Brandefense is a FIRST Associate. We are not a Full Member, and the membership is not an endorsement of our products. The membership shows that we take part in the community that sets many of the standards our field relies on.
What It Means for Our Work
Our Cyber Threat Intelligence work depends on shared standards and on trust between defenders. Two things follow from the membership:
- We can learn from other security teams and take part in FIRST’s community resources, within the limits of an Associate membership.
- Customers and partners can check the membership themselves on the public FIRST member page.
If you want to see how the three scores work together in practice, read our article on CVSS, EPSS and CISA KEV signals. For the wider case for sharing, see threat intelligence sharing between defenders.