A PSIRT, or Product Security Incident Response Team, is the group inside a company that identifies, assesses and decides what to do about vulnerabilities in the products it makes or sells. A small team does not need a department, but it does need the functions: intake, analysis, fixing and disclosure, each with a named owner.
What FIRST says a PSIRT is
FIRST publishes a PSIRT Services Framework. It describes a PSIRT as a group that focuses on the identification, assessment and disposition of risks associated with security vulnerabilities in products, working as part of the organization's secure engineering rather than in isolation.
The service areas
The framework organizes the work into service areas. The sections we could confirm are the first two:
| Service area | Services listed |
|---|---|
| Stakeholder ecosystem management | Internal stakeholders, finder community engagement, community and organizational engagement, downstream stakeholders, incident communications inside the organization, rewarding finders with recognition and acknowledgement, stakeholder metrics |
| Vulnerability discovery | Intake of vulnerability reporting, identifying unreported vulnerabilities |
The framework goes on to cover further areas, including analysis, remediation and disclosure. Read the full document for the complete list.
Functions, not headcount
If you are five engineers, you can still cover each function:
- Intake: one shared mailbox or form, monitored by two people.
- Analysis: one engineer who confirms and rates reports each week.
- Remediation: the owning team fixes, with the analyst reviewing.
- Disclosure: one person writes the advisory from a template.
- Downstream communication: a list of customers who should hear first.
- Recognition: a standard credit line and a thank you.
- Metrics: time to first reply and time to fix, written down.
When to formalize
Consider a named PSIRT lead when any of these is true: you ship software customers install, you have more than a few reports a quarter, regulators or contracts require a vulnerability handling process, or a single incident took more than a week to coordinate. For EU product obligations, see the CRA 72 hour reporting rule.
Try it yourself
Click through it at your own pace, or open it full screen.
Watch how findings are tracked and assigned, which is the day to day work a PSIRT function does.
Quick check
Is a PSIRT the same as a SOC?
No. A PSIRT deals with vulnerabilities in products you make. A SOC watches for attacks on your own systems.
Can one person act as a PSIRT?
They can cover the functions at small scale, but name a backup so reports are not missed during leave.
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Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
