Facebook has decided to launch a social network for cyber security experts, where they can share information about threats of cyber attacks.
They’ve dubbed it ThreatExchange.
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Is that the place where folks can exchange threats safely? Probably not.
We used to call it a message board, back when there was no Facebook and you’d just tie your horse outside the Internet Café and go rent a computer by the hour.
Facebook is collaborating with Yahoo and Pinterest for this venture.
What, no Google?
Companies will be using this platform to share clues about hacker behavior—that’s chatter to you and me—hoping that they could stop their attacks before they happen.
Like a message board.
Facebook’s manager of threat infrastructure Mark Hammel said ThreatExchange was developed from a system his people were using to catalogue threats to the social network in real time.
“We quickly learned that sharing with one another was key to beating the botnet because parts of it were hosted on our respective services and none of us had the complete picture, ” he said.
A botnet is a collection of Internet-connected programs, usually collaborating to send spam email or to participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Facebook is giving the service away for free, Hammel noted, unlike most virus protection systems that charge.
“We feel that as our product’s footprint has grown, with the number of people using it to communicate, we have the ability to spend more time on broader security issues that affect the internet, ” he said, adding that Facebook was the ideal platform for threat detection, because its so big and “really well positioned” to direct the project.
Unless a yet unknown Facebook bug appears somewhere and wipes out half the Internet, because, like the man said, Facebook is so well positioned.
According to the Financial Times, the financial industry leads the way in sharing information. The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center — a.k.a. FS-ISAC — joined the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation last September, in launching the first large, not-for-profit intelligence service. That project is funded by 12 companies from finance, energy and healthcare.
