IBM opens up threat intelligence data to help combat cyber attacks

With cyber attacks often being driven by organized crime rings and the tools and expertise behind them widely shared, threat intelligence is more important than ever to fend them off.

Announcing today that it's opening up more than two decades' worth of cyber threat intelligence IBM is seeking to unite, mobilize and rally the private sector to defend itself against increasingly sophisticated and organized cyber threats.

It's set up a new cloud platform called X-Force Exchange which builds on IBM's scale in security intelligence, integrating its portfolio of deep threat research data and technologies like QRadar, thousands of global clients, along with the acumen of a worldwide network of security analysts and experts from IBM Managed Security Services.

"The IBM X-Force Exchange platform will foster collaboration on a scale necessary to counter the rapidly rising and sophisticated threats that companies are facing from cybercriminals," says Brendan Hannigan, General Manager of IBM Security. "We're taking the lead by opening up our own deep and global network of cyberthreat research, customers, technologies and experts. By inviting the industry to join our efforts and share their own intelligence, we're aiming to accelerate the formation of the networks and relationships we need to fight hackers".

The X-Force Exchange features over 700 terabytes of raw aggregated data supplied by IBM. This makes it one of the largest and most complete catalogs of vulnerabilities in the world. Data includes threat information based on monitoring of more than 15 billion security events per day, malware threat intelligence from a network of 270 million endpoints, threat information based on over 25 billion web pages and images, intelligence on more than 8 million spam and phishing attacks, and reputation data on nearly a million malicious IP addresses.

The data will continue to grow, be updated and shared. The platform is able to add up to a thousand malicious indicators every hour including real-time information which is critical to the battle against cybercrime.

Within the platform, IBM intends to provide future support for STIX and TAXII, the emerging standard for automated threat intelligence sharing. This will make for easy extraction and sharing of information to and from the exchange, as well as enabling seamless integration into existing security systems.

You can find more information about IBM X-Force Exchange  on the company's website.

Image Credit: Tomasz Bidermann/Shutterstock