Facebook has teamed up with tech giants Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo to develop a new social platform called ThreatExchange where security professionals can share information on cyber threats.
“Our goal is that organizations anywhere will be able to use ThreatExchange to share threat information more easily, learn from each other's discoveries, and make their own systems safer. That's the beauty of working together on security. When one company gets stronger, so do the rest of us,” says Mark Hammell is Manager of the Threat Infrastructure team at Facebook in a detailed post.
Facebook's ThreatExchange is based on the social network's existing infrastructure, though layered APIs on top of it that allows partner companies to access the threat information.
“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,” explains Facebook.
Those interested in participating in the ThreatExchange beta need to sign up at threatexchange.fb.com.
In spite of several efforts, internet security has remained top concern across the world. With more users going online, internet safety has become more critical. However, cyber attacks have only grown and become more dangerous.
Even as Facebook is making efforts to bring more people online through its Internet.org and ambitious Drones projects, the new ThreatExchange platform is a welcome move.