The platform for national cybersecurity early warning
Production infrastructure for teams responsible for warning an entire constituency — collecting threat and exposure data, matching it to the organisations it affects, and delivering it in a form those organisations will act on.
Trusted by national cyber security centres, sectoral CSIRTs, and service providers.
Most cyberattacks are not surprises
The vulnerability was already known to exist on that system. The exposed service had been visible for months. The warning simply never arrived.
Early warning exists to close that gap: to make sure the right information reaches the right organisation, about the right asset, before it becomes an incident. Doing that for a handful of organisations is manageable with spreadsheets and goodwill. Doing it for thousands is a different problem entirely — one of infrastructure, not effort.
Teams that set out to build this capability in-house tend to encounter the same four obstacles, in roughly the same order.
Scale
National early warning means serving hundreds or thousands of organisations, each with its own infrastructure, contacts, and appetite for detail. Systems designed around a manageable set of critical-infrastructure organisations rarely survive an order-of-magnitude increase in constituency size without a rebuild.
Development capacity
Building a national early warning platform from scratch takes engineering resources most CSIRT teams cannot spare from their operational mandate. And the initial build is the smaller half of the commitment: once the system is live, development becomes permanent.
Sources and staff both turn over
External feeds evolve, formats shift, and integrations break. The specialist knowledge needed to maintain them typically lives with one or two people — and leaves when they do. A capability that depends on two individuals is not an institutional capability.
The hidden cost is headcount
Based on our experience working with national CSIRT teams, a custom-built early warning stack typically consumes the equivalent of one to two full-time positions in ongoing maintenance — more for larger deployments. That cost is rarely in the business case, because it isn't a line item: it's analyst capacity absorbed into keeping the pipeline alive.
The consequence is predictable and, from the outside, invisible: more inputs, less clarity, slower warnings.
NIS2 changes the scale, not just the workload
Before NIS2, many national programmes could focus on a manageable set of critical infrastructure organisations. NIS2 expands both the sectors in scope and the obligations attached to them — and the practical effect on a national CSIRT's constituency is an order-of-magnitude change rather than a percentage one.
A constituency that grows by a factor of ten or fifteen does not simply require more of the same work. Manual stakeholder registration stops being viable. Asset inventories maintained by hand go stale faster than they can be corrected. Notification volume rises past the point where a recipient will read everything they are sent — which means prioritisation stops being a courtesy and becomes the difference between a service that works and one that trains its constituency to ignore it.
NIS2 also gives the mandate teeth in the other direction. Article 11(3) explicitly authorises CSIRTs to carry out proactive, non-intrusive scanning of the publicly accessible systems of essential and important entities — discovery and notification ahead of an incident is not merely permitted, it is written into the directive as a CSIRT task.
Arctic Hub is built for that transition: an operating model for visibility, prioritisation, coordination, and delivery that holds at national scale rather than degrading with it.
One platform, not a stack to assemble
Building early warning capability from components means assembling and maintaining multiple moving parts — user interfaces, message queues, databases, data parsers, output connectors, notification mechanisms — each with its own dependencies and update cycles. When one component changes, integrations break. Adding a data feed means writing or adapting code.
Arctic Hub ships all of it as a single integrated platform, built, versioned, and maintained together. No components to integrate, no custom code to connect standard data feeds, no version alignment to manage across a stack.
That integration is the product. Every capability here exists in other forms somewhere — as an open-source component, a script, a feed subscription. What Arctic Hub provides is all of them operating as one system — one version, one upgrade path, one vendor accountable for the whole.
Designed for the whole team
The web interface is built for security operations rather than for system administrators. Analysts without an engineering background can add stakeholders, review findings, configure notification schedules, and track outcomes from day one. The programme stops depending on one or two technical specialists — which is what turns an early warning service from a project into an institutional capability that survives staff turnover.
From data source to acted-upon warning
Arctic Hub's operating model has four stages. Each one is a place where early warning programmes commonly stall — and each is handled as a platform capability rather than as a team responsibility.
Connect the sources that matter
Arctic Hub supports the range of free, commercial, and private data feeds national teams typically consume — internet scan and exposure data, vulnerability intelligence, malicious-infrastructure and reputation data, phishing and malware indicators, leaked-credential corpora, DNS and certificate data. Feeds are operator-activated: your team decides what enters the pipeline and what gets shared with which stakeholders.
Input APIs let internally generated data — national vulnerability scan results, for example — be matched against the customer database and delivered as targeted notifications automatically. Your own scanning capability becomes an input to the same delivery machinery, not a parallel workflow. New feeds and report types are added as the ecosystem evolves, as part of the maintained platform.
Harmonize and enrich automatically
Data arrives in inconsistent formats and means different things in different sources. Arctic Hub normalises heterogeneous feeds into a single automation-ready event model, governed by a documented data harmonization ontology — the same vocabulary work Arctic Security has contributed to the CSIRT community for well over a decade. Consistent field semantics are the precondition for filtering, matching, sharing, and reporting across sources that were never designed to work together.
Enrichment then adds the context that determines whether a finding deserves attention. Most significantly, CVEs are cross-referenced against the CISA and VulnCheck Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogues, and matching events carry that context through to the recipient. The difference between "this software has a published vulnerability" and "this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild right now" is the difference between a queue item and a warning.
Discover assets at national scale
One of the hardest problems in national early warning is knowing what you are protecting. Most stakeholder organisations have incomplete visibility into their own internet-facing infrastructure — and without accurate asset data, notifications miss. A vulnerability goes unreported because the system doesn't know that infrastructure exists.
Arctic Hub includes built-in automated asset discovery. Starting from each organisation's known identifiers — IP ranges, domain names, ASNs — the platform continuously maps their externally visible infrastructure. The discovery subsystem was rebuilt in 2026 specifically for scale, backed by a dedicated cached DNS resolution service. For teams scaling to meet NIS2-driven constituency growth this is not an optional refinement: manual asset registration does not scale to thousands of organisations. Automated discovery does.
Deliver warnings people act on
Arctic Hub is API-native: even email notifications are delivered through APIs, which is what makes reliable delivery at scale possible — while traditional attachment-based email remains fully supported, because a significant part of any real constituency still wants it. Issue-based notifications aggregate less urgent issue types to reduce volume; alert-based notifications trigger the moment critical information becomes available. Recipients working in the browser get an interactive notification viewer that is a sortable, filterable, configurable, rather than a static table.
Delivery is also a choice of service level. For many programmes, what this step describes is the right offering: warnings arrive by email, recipients open an interactive viewer, and the more capable organisations take a feed through the API. Some programmes want to offer their constituency more than delivery. This is a service each organisation signs in to, with its own assets, dashboards, and notification settings in its own hands. That is a different product available in early preview to select customers, built on this same platform.
A note on where delivery ends. Arctic Hub's job is to deliver cleanly to the organisation — the right organisation, about the right asset, with enough context to act. It does not attempt to route inside that organisation to the individual who owns the system, because no national or sectoral operator can see far enough inside a constituent organisation to do that reliably. That boundary is not a shortfall: delivering to the organisation, at a volume and quality it can act on, is a complete job at this layer. End-user portal doesn't move the boundary — it lets the operator host a part of the tooling on it, so organisations manage their own recipients and notification settings inside your service. The last-mile work itself stays where it belongs: with the organisation — which is the problem EWS Flex and EWS Classic exist to solve on the other side of the boundary. Where the layers overlap, that overlap is resilience, not duplication: a chain that tolerates one weak link.
A warning system is only as good as its worst week
Every early warning programme faces the same slow failure. Volume rises. The proportion of notifications that require no action rises with it. Recipients begin to skim, then to batch, then to ignore. By the time a genuinely urgent warning arrives, the channel has lost its authority — and nothing about the detection was wrong.
Relevance is the discipline of preventing that, and it is mostly mechanical rather than editorial. Arctic Hub provides four mechanisms for it.
Event muting
Per-customer suppression rules, with optional expiry dates, let a known false positive or an accepted risk stop generating notifications without anyone hand-filtering a queue. The expiry matters more than it sounds: suppression that never expires quietly becomes a blind spot.
Deterministic event grouping
Repeat observations of the same underlying issue are recognised as the same issue rather than re-sent as new findings. A stakeholder sees one problem that persists — the difference between a queue that reflects reality and one that inflates it.
KEV augmentation
Known-exploited-vulnerability context attached to the events it applies to — description, addition date, CWE, source. A defensible basis for prioritisation that isn't just CVSS score sorting, for the operator and the recipient alike.
Customer-specific scan matching
Scan configurations can be tied directly to a customer, so results from targeted vulnerability scanning reach the right organisation regardless of whether network-asset matching would have resolved the ownership.
Individually these are features. Together they are the reason a constituency keeps opening the notifications after year three.
Knowing whether the service is working
CSIRT teams running notification services are frequently unable to answer three questions their own management, and often their funding ministry, will eventually ask: is this reaching the right audience, is that audience using it, and is the programme improving? Arctic Hub tracks sharing activity per customer — when an organisation last accessed the data shared with it, and when notifications were last sent, by share type.
Stakeholders who never engage are visible, so support effort goes to the organisations that need help rather than being spread evenly across a constituency.
Engagement tracked over time and across sectors turns "the service seems to be going well" into something defensible.
Delivery and engagement evidence is what sustains funding and mandate conversations with management and oversight bodies.
Stakeholders who never engage are visible, so support effort goes to the organisations that need help rather than being spread evenly across a constituency.
Engagement tracked over time and across sectors turns "the service seems to be going well" into something defensible.
Delivery and engagement evidence is what sustains funding and mandate conversations with management and oversight bodies.
Customer tagging by sector or industry supports the same analysis from the other direction: how prevalent a given vulnerability is across a specific part of the national economy, and which sectors are responding to warnings about it.
National and sectoral teams, one picture
Many national programmes are not a single team. Sectoral CSIRTs — finance, health, energy, academic networks — operate with their own constituencies, their own trust relationships, and their own operational autonomy, while the national team retains responsibility for the national picture.
Arctic Hub supports this directly: individual Hub instances can be connected, with customer databases synchronised between them. A sectoral CSIRT runs its own Hub and manages its own constituency day to day, while syncing constituency data upstream so the national situational picture stays current.
National situational awareness without a single centralised system — which matters, because centralisation is frequently the thing that makes sectoral teams unwilling to participate at all. Financial sector CSIRTs are among the most active users of this model. Where a hierarchical structure doesn't apply, each Hub operates independently, and nothing about the platform assumes otherwise.
Production-ready from day one
Arctic Hub is deployed as a containerised platform in the environment you choose, including fully on-premise deployment where national data-sovereignty requirements demand it. Installation onto hosts without direct internet access is a documented, supported procedure — which matters for teams operating inside restricted government network zones. There is no multi-year software development project, and no specialist developers are required to begin.
What comes with the platform
Training and enablement for your staff, practice shared from 30+ national deployments, and continuous product development as part of the licence — upgrades are a supported path, not a migration project.
What the licence model does
Licensing scales with deployment, so a programme can start with a narrow constituency and expand without a commercial renegotiation at every step.
Security & compliance posture
Hardened for government and critical-infrastructure environments: network-isolated database containers, read-only configuration, CSP headers, current enterprise Linux support. Security fixes ship in the maintained release stream.
In practice
More than 30 national CSIRT teams across 24+ countries — such as NCSC-FI in Finland — use Arctic Hub as the foundation of their early warning services. The largest known deployment reaches over 20,000 subscriber organisations.
A constituency spanning critical infrastructure, public administration, and the private sector — organisations with almost nothing in common except that someone has to warn them. Data processing, asset matching, and notification handled by the platform is what makes a national programme runnable by a small team.
Open by design, serving large numbers of autonomous users across many institutions, with a broad and often poorly mapped attack surface. Distributing sectoral vulnerability scan results is particularly valuable here — a capability the CSIRT can provide centrally.
Financial sector teams in particular use the federation model to combine targeted delivery to their own members with upstream synchronisation to the national picture.
“"This programme and Arctic Hub has been a game changer for our team."
Choose the model that fits your mandate and resources
Standard commercial licensing
For organisations that need full platform capability, predictable operations, and a direct vendor support relationship. Licensing scales with deployment size.
CSIRT Development Programme
For eligible new or resource-constrained CSIRTs, including FIRST fellows and CSIRTs formed within the last five years: a one-year free period followed by sliding-scale pricing. National CSIRTs can nominate sectoral CSIRTs in their own country. As of 2026 the programme covers 24 countries across six continents.
Offering your constituency a portal? Arctic offers a a separate product for programmes that want each constituent organisation to have its own place in the service. It includes this platform's processing engine and has its own commercial conversation — talk to us about which product fits your mandate.
Build, adopt open source, or license a platform
Teams building national early warning capability have a real choice, and it isn't a foregone conclusion.
A proven path with a decade-plus record
Many national CSIRTs — including some of the longest-running programmes in Europe — build on open-source frameworks such as IntelMQ, maintained by CERT.at, or on software written and maintained in-house. No licence cost, transparent all the way down.
The trade-off is maintenance, not capability: pipeline configs as feeds change format, harmonization mappings, component upgrades, and documentation good enough that the system survives staff turnover. Teams that budget this honestly run it well for a long time. Teams that treat it as a one-off build more often find the stack fragile a few years and a couple of staff changes later.
Arctic Hub
Trades that ongoing burden for a subscription and a support relationship. The pipeline, harmonization, and upgrade work the other path asks the team to own is absorbed by the vendor.
Neither path is free: they spend the effort in different places, and the right answer depends on how much sustained engineering capacity your programme can commit to something that is not itself the mission.
For a capability-by-capability view, see the detailed comparison.
Next steps
What is early warning?
The practice this platform implements, written as a reference rather than a pitch.
CSIRT Development Programme
Free first year and sliding-scale access for eligible teams.
Ready to scale early warning for the NIS2 era?
Tell us about your constituency, your operating model, and where your coverage obligations are heading. We'll show you what running it on Arctic Hub looks like.