IBM has brought together more than 1,000 organisations to share threat intelligence as it seeks to combat dangerous fragmentation in the cybersecurity industry.
The company launched X-Force Exchange only last month but has already seen uptake across 16 industries, with members joining the scheme to give and receive data feeds on emerging cybercrime.
Brendan Hannigan, GM at IBM Security, said: "Cybercrime has become the equivalent of a pandemic – no company or country can battle it alone.
"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."
Powered by IBM Cloud, the initiative allows members access to a 700TB threat database, a volume equivalent to the data that flows across the Internet every two days.
Included in the database is two decades worth of cyberattack data from IBM, as well as the anonymous contributions of the firm’s customers.
"Cybercrime continues to grow in sophistication and organisation, we understand that there is power in numbers to fight back," said Rob Bening, CISO at ING Bank, which is part of the scheme.
"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."
