Today, IBM has announced a new global cyber threat intelligence sharing platform to make its huge store of about two-decade worth of security and cyber-threat data available to private and public companies.
It is powered by the wisdom and expertise of a worldwide community of cyber security professionals.
Present-day cyber criminals perform their tasks in highly sophisticated, organized and often well-funded networks. They rapidly share data, tools and expertise to launch large, high tech attacks with tremendous ROI. Many of these attacks cannot be detected until after millions of data records or dollars have been stolen.
The company said that it will offer its massive 700-terabyte (and growing) database of raw cyber-threat data and intelligence to companies having demand for it.
“We’re taking the lead by opening up our own deep and global network of cyber threat research, customers, technologies and experts,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager for IBM Security. “We’re aiming to accelerate the formation of the networks and relationships we need to fight hackers.”
The new social platform, the IBM X-Force Exchange, is designed to foster cyber security intelligence-sharing across companies and industries. It features intelligence from the 15 billion security events, database of nearly 100,000 security vulnerabilities, and intelligence on millions of endpoints, systems, web threats and spam and phishing attacks.
As cyber criminals are becoming more skillful to cause threat to our data as well as to our ability to freely take advantage of mobile computing, e-commerce, the Internet and other advance technology. The company claims that by knowing more about the tools, techniques, and activities of hackers, they will be able to stop them.
The company said, “If we can spread cyber threat intelligence as quickly and widely as the ‘bad guys’ do, we have a chance to fight back against this new face of organized crime.”
However, the US government is also trying to encourage the idea of companies sharing cyber-threat data with the government (and vice-versa) in order to reduce the number of cyber attacks faced by the technology industry.