IBM Claims 1,000 Organizations Sign On to X-Force Anti-Cyber Crime Initiative

IBM (IBM) said that since introducing its X-Force Exchange anti-cybercrime platform last month, some 1,000 organizations spanning 16 industries have signed on to the threat intelligence network.

In mid-April, IBM said it will make available its library of security and cyber-threat intelligence with a new cloud-based platform called X-Force Exchange that private and public organizations can access to combat cybercrime.

The vendor’s platform is expressive of a new collaborative approach by those targeted by cyber intruders to share threat intelligence for their mutual protection. The X-Force Exchange platform provides access both to IBM and third-party threat data worldwide, including real-time indicators of live attacks.

“Cybercrime has become the equivalent of a pandemic — no company or country can battle it alone,” said Brendan Hannigan, IBM Security general manager.

“We have to take a collective and collaborative approach across the public and private sectors to defend against cybercrime,” he said. “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. With X-Force Exchange, IBM has opened access to our extensive threat data to advance collaboration and help public and private enterprises safeguard themselves.”

ING Bank is one of the early signees to the X-Force Exchange. Rob Bening, ING Bank chief information security officer, said collaboration and communication by organizations to fight cybercrime is a step in the right direction.

“Cybercrime continues to grow in sophistication and organization, we understand that there is power in numbers to fight back,” he said. “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.”

According to IBM, since launching the X-Force initiative last month, it’s received more than 1,000 data queries per day from organizations worldwide, including six of the world’s top 10 retailers and five of the top 10 banks. In addition, inquiries have come from companies in the automotive, education and high-tech industries, IBM said.

The X-Force Exchange currently houses some 700 terabytes of IBM-supplied raw, aggregated data but the vendor anticipates as the platform is updated and shared it will grow, perhaps to its capacity to add 1,000 malicious indicators every hour.

At this point, X-Force Exchange includes threat information from monitoring 15 billion monitored security events per day and more than 25 billion web pages and images; malware threat intelligence from a network of 270 million endpoints; data from more than 8 million spam and phishing attacks; and, reputation data on approximately one million malicious IP addresses.