On Wednesday Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook was announced new ThreatExchange website, designed for security experts and companies to collaborate and share information about online threats they're seeing.A group of technology companies came together to discuss a botnet that was spreading a malware-based spam attack on all of the Facebook based services.
Initial partners to ThreatExchange include Bitly, Dropbox, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo. ThreatExchange is an application programming interface that builds on Facebook's internal threat system called ThreatData.
ThreatExchange is the latest attempt to help stave off a plague of cyberattacks hitting corporations and governments worldwide. Following the devastating hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment last fall, US President Barack Obama allocated $14 billion in the 2016 budget to beef up cybersecurity efforts.
ThreatExchange is built on the existing Facebook platform infrastructure, and they are layered APIs on top of it so that partner companies can query the available threat information and also publish to all or a subset of participating organizations.
Threat data is typically freely available information like domain names and malware samples, but for situations where a company might only want to share certain indicators with companies known to be experiencing the same issues, built-in controls make limited sharing easy and help avoid errors by using a pre-defined set of data fields.
On Tuesday, the administration announced the creation of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, which will coordinate cybersecurity efforts across government agencies.
Author Venkatesh Yalagandula Follow us Google + and Facebook and Twitter
