McAfee, Symantec Join Cyber Consortium

New Alliance Aims to Share Threat Intelligence
McAfee, Symantec Join Cyber Consortium

Security firms McAfee and Symantec have joined the Cyber Threat Alliance that was launched in May by Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks.

See Also: Threat Information Sharing: The Need for a Structured Approach

The mission of the consortium is to improve the sharing of cross-industry, cross-vendor threat intelligence, while boosting coordination of incident response and helping to prevent cyber-attacks that use advanced malware (see: Security Vendors Form Cyber Consortium). Membership is open to technology vendors, government agencies, not-for-profit groups and corporations.

"Cybersecurity breaches are getting larger, more costly and more frequent," says Adam Bromwich, vice president of security technology and response at Symantec. "By working together to thwart the next generation of cyber-attacks, we will be more effective in fighting to keep the Internet safe for users around the world."

Vincent Weafer, senior vice president for McAfee Labs, a unit of Intel Security, adds: "This cyber alliance provides a critical framework for educating each other on the infrastructure and evolving tactics behind these attacks."

Along with enabling the sharing of malware samples among member organizations, the new alliance will also provide information on zero-day vulnerabilities, botnet command-and-control server information, mobile threats and indicators of compromise related to advanced persistent threats.

Since the consortium was announced, organizers have been working out the technical details on how to automate the threat-sharing process, as well as agreeing on by-laws, says Rick Howard, chief security officer at Palo Alto Networks.

Organizations that are interested in joining the consortium can complete an online form. The minimum requirement is that the organization is able to share at least 1,000 samples of new malware executables every day, according to the consortium's website.


About the Author

Jeffrey Roman

Jeffrey Roman

News Writer, ISMG

Roman is the former News Writer for Information Security Media Group. Having worked for multiple publications at The College of New Jersey, including the College's newspaper "The Signal" and alumni magazine, Roman has experience in journalism, copy editing and communications.




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