In its fight against the botnets, malware and hackers, Facebook has realised that on its own it can only do so much so for ThreatEchange it has teamed up with several tech and big Internet companies. Facebook says that the ThreatExchange will be worlds first scalable threat fight data center and will be used for exchanging security threat information. Hammell says that Facebook toyed with the idea of having such a kind of threat based analysis exchange a year ago, when Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo had to collaborate and exchange attack information in order to stop a massive botnet-powered malware-slinging campaign that used all of their services to reach as many users as possible. He further adds, “Threat data is typically freely available information like domain names and malware samples, but for situations where a company might only want to share certain indicators with companies known to be experiencing the same issues, built-in controls make limited sharing easy and help avoid errors by using a pre-defined set of data fields.” Now for ThreatExhange, in addition to Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter and Yahoo!, Bitly and Dropbox will also participate and Facebook said that other tech companies have also been invited to contribute. “Our goal is that organizations anywhere will be able to use ThreatExchange to share threat information more easily, learn from each other’s discoveries, and make their own systems safer,” concluded Hammell. Facebook’s ThreatExchange platform is built upon the ThreatData framework and Facebook infrastructure so its partners can rest assured about the logistics and other paraphernalia. With the resources and logistics in place, the partnering companies can share any amount of security related information they deem fit, with each other. Also, they can decide what data they want to share with whom. The identifiable plan of the ThreatExchange is to share as much data regarding security attacks, be it botnets, malware or hackers, as possible. The ThreatExchange will certainly come into play if a hacker group has capacity to launch a cyberwar against the interests of partnering firms and intends to exploit any weaknesses in them.
