Top global banks, retailers join IBM to battle cyber crime

IBM  announced that more than 1,000 organizations across 16 industries, including five of world's top 10 banks, six of top 10 retailers, 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 cyber crime.

IBM's new cloud-based cyber-threat 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 cyber attack data from IBM, as well as anonymous threat data from the thousands of organisations for which IBM manages security operations. Participants have created more than 300 new collections of threat data in the last month alone.

"Cyber crime 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 cyber crime.

"Sharing and innovating around threat data is central to battling highly organised cyber criminals; the industry can no longer afford to keep this critical resource locked up in proprietary databases. With X-Force Exchange, IBM has opened access to our extensive threat data to advance collaboration and help public and private enterprises safeguard themselves.''

"Cyber crime continues to grow in sophistication and organisation, we understand that there is power in numbers to fight back," said 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, they 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 operationalize threat intelligence and take action.

In the aftermath of the severe data breaches at US reatiler Target, a Fortune 1000 retail chain is using the X-Force Exchange to collect and analyse 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.

Designed to help move the industry forward on threat intelligence sharing, IBM's vast library of security intelligence data via IBM X-Force Exchange includes:

• One of the largest and most complete catalogs of vulnerabilities in the world;
• Threat information based on more than 15 billion monitored 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;
• Deep intelligence on more than 8 million spam and phishing attacks;
• Reputation data on nearly 1 million malicious IP addresses.