In a DailySignal.com commentary, writer Jennifer Guthrie is urging lawmakers and business leaders to join forces and improve how they share information regarding cyber threats on both a micro and macro level — for the benefit of everyone.
“Information sharing includes data on cyber threats and potential vulnerabilities that could be used to disrupt the operations of a system or steal information,” writes Guthrie. “When cyber data is exchanged between the private sector and government agencies, stakeholders can be warned and informed about current vulnerabilities in a system, as well as potential attacks.”
What Guthrie refers to as information sharing is essentially the process of using crowdsourced threat intelligence to keep businesses, government organizations, and law enforcement agencies connected and informed of current and pending cyber threats — but without compromising privacy, which is a major concern in the private sector, where restoring a damaged reputation after a data breach can be a costly and prolonged effort.
“It is important that private sector entities are protected from legal and regulatory ramifications potentially involved with sharing,” writes Guthrie. “This ensures that companies won’t be afraid to share cybersecurity information due to liability fears.”
Indeed, avoiding liability and reputation damage is a key reason why a 2013 survey found that just 2% of enterprises would willingly reveal in public that they suffered a data breach. Furthermore, only 11% would inform the security community, 31% would inform employees, and 38% would inform the authorities or law enforcement.
Fortunately, Seculert’s cloud-based breach analytics platform has been designed to enable automatic, crowdsourced intelligence on cyber threats, while maintaining privacy at the individual-enterprise level. Here’s how:
Seculert’s automated Traffic Log Analysis works in the background to identify malicious, suspicious or unusual activity in any log source — even if the logs originate from different vendor products. And if malware is detected, Seculert automatically correlates the behavior with similar activities detected in other sources.
As a result, targeted cyber attacks across distributed enterprise environments — or even across multiple organizations and industries — can be discovered and leveraged to help all Seculert customers enhance their network security.
And just as importantly: of this happens anonymously, which means that the 98% of enterprises that wouldn’t willingly disclose a breach in public can still share vital information on cyber threats – which doesn’t just help make other enterprises and organizations more secure. In the bigger picture, it keeps them safer, too.
Interested to see the results of Seculert’s crowdsourced intelligence? Check out our recently released report, “State of Perimeter Security Defenses.”
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