The first organization of its kind, the CERT/CC was created in Pittsburgh in November 1988 at DARPA's direction in response to the Morris worm incident.

[1] The CERT/CC is now part of the CERT Division of the Software Engineering Institute, which has more than 150 cybersecurity professionals working on projects that take a proactive approach to securing systems.

The CERT Program partners with government, industry, law enforcement, and academia to develop advanced methods and technologies to counter large-scale, sophisticated cyber threats.

The CERT Program is part of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) at Carnegie Mellon University's main campus in Pittsburgh.

[2] In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security entered into an agreement with Carnegie Mellon University to create US-CERT.

[3] US-CERT is the national computer security incident response team (CSIRT) for the United States of America.

The CERT/CC established FIRST, an organization promoting cooperation and information exchange between the various National CERTs and private product security incident response teams (PSIRTs).