NEC joins Cyber Threat Alliance for sharing cyber threat information

The organization was formed in January 2017 by six large security companies (Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco, Fortinet, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, and Symantec) with the aim of generating and sharing cross-industrial, exhaustive and valuable threat information.

Moreover, in February 2017, Michael Daniel, the former White House Special Assistant to the President, was appointed as the first CEO and President of the CTA. Currently, the CTA has a membership of 20 companies, including NEC.

CTA member companies can receive approximately 65,000 Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX) packages every day via the threat information-sharing platform operated by the CTA. STIX packages contain traces of threats, such as file hashes of malware and malicious domain names, and contextualized threat information, such as targeted attack campaigns and cyber adversaries. Members can use the information for their own analysis or to enhance their products and services.

For CTA member companies to receive threat information, they are required to provide their own threat information with a certain value based on algorithms specified by the CTA. Thus, they need to maintain the technologies to collect, analyse and evaluate their own threat information. With this approach, the CTA is enabling the sharing of cyber threat information that is mutually beneficial to member companies.