Computerworld

World’s leading companies join fight as IBM tackles cybercrime “pandemic”

“Cybercrime has become the equivalent of a pandemic - no company or country can battle it alone.”

IBM has announced that more than 1000 organisations across 16 industries are participating in its X-Force Exchange threat intelligence network, just one month after its launch.

IBM X-Force Exchange provides open access to historical and real-time data feeds of threat intelligence, including reports of live attacks from IBM’s global threat monitoring network, enabling enterprises to defend against cybercrime.

IBM's new cloud-based cyberthreat network, powered by IBM Cloud, is designed to foster broader industry collaboration by sharing actionable data to defend against these very real threats to businesses and governments.

The company provided free access last month, via the X-Force Exchange, to its 700 terabyte threat database – a volume equivalent to all data that flows across the internet in two days.

This includes two decades of malicious cyberattack data from IBM, as well as anonymous threat data from the thousands of organisations for which IBM manages security operations. At present, participants have created more than 300 new collections of threat data in the last month alone.

“Cybercrime has become the equivalent of a pandemic -- no company or country can battle it alone," says Brendan Hannigan, General Manager, IBM Security.

“We have to take a collective and collaborative approach across the public and private sectors to defend against cybercrime.

“Sharing and innovating around threat data is central to battling highly organised cybercriminals; the industry can no longer afford to keep this critical resource locked up in proprietary databases.”

With X-Force Exchange, Hannigan says IBM has opened access to its “extensive threat data” to advance collaboration and help public and private enterprises safeguard themselves.

“Cybercrime continues to grow in sophistication and organisation, we understand that there is power in numbers to fight back," adds Rob Bening, Chief Information Security Officer, ING Bank.

“Sharing threat information via IBM's X-Force Exchange initiative is a big step toward better understanding potential attacks and anticipating measures to mitigate them.”

In the past month since the launch of IBM's threat intelligence network, there have been more than 1,000 data queries per day from organisations around the world.

These organisations include six of the world's top 10 retailers and five of the top 10 banks, as well as the top 10 companies across the automotive, education and high-tech industries.

By freely consuming, sharing and acting on real-time threat intelligence from their networks and IBM’s own repository of threat intelligence, users can identify and help stop threats.

The IBM X-Force Exchange features a collaborative, social interface enabling users to easily interact with, and validate information from, industry peers, analysts and researchers.

Also with a library of APIs, security analysts can facilitate programmatic queries between the platform, machines and applications, helping businesses to operationalise threat intelligence and take action.