More than 1,000 organizations across 16 industries are participating in IBM’s X-Force Exchange threat intelligence network, which aims to provide open access to historical and real-time data feeds of threat intelligence, including reports of live attacks from IBM’s global threat monitoring network.
Launched a month ago, 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.
IBM 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 organizations for which IBM manages security operations. 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," said 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 organized cybercriminals; the industry can no longer afford to keep this critical resource locked up in proprietary databases.”
IBM said since the launch of the network a month ago, there have been more than 1,000 data queries per day from organizations around the world, including queries from 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.
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. With a library of APIs, security analysts can facilitate programmatic queries between the platform, machines and applications, helping businesses to operationalize threat intelligence and take action.
For example, a Fortune 1000 retail chain is using the X-Force Exchange to collect and analyze threat intelligence - streamlining from seven separate sources of threat data to just one - enabling the chain to significantly reduce the time required to identify and investigate each potential threat.