AlienVault has added new partners to its crowd-sourced threat intelligence platform to improve information sharing between private sector organizations, security vendors, and government organizations.

The AlienVault Open Threat Exchange program provides real-time threat data to thousands of private sector companies, security vendors, and government institutions. Over 8,000 sites across 140 countries have participated in OTX since its launch two years ago. OTX analyzes more than 500,000 malware samples and validates 100,000 malicious IP addresses every day, AlienVault said in a release.

The new partners for the program are Cegeka, GoGrid, Netflow Logic, Onsight, Risk I/O and ThreatStop.

“As security professionals, one of the most important things we can do is to share threat intelligence as widely as possible,” said Wendy Nather, research director of enterprise security for 451 Research. “It turns the usual asymmetry on its head: normally the defender only has to make one mistake, and the adversary can get in. But in this case, the adversary only has to mess up once to be detected, and all defenders will know about it.”

As the custodian of the threat data repository, AlienVault shares the information with partners over the OTX API at no extra cost. AlienVault also integrated OTX into the Spiceworks community platform so that its members can take advantage of the threat intelligence data. Spiceworks counts IT professionals in nearly 10,000 companies as members. With the integration, members received over 1.4 million threat alerts, according to AlienVault.

With the increase in data breaches and devastating impact on consumer data, security experts are increasingly calling for better information sharing and communications program so that organizations can exchange threat data and defense methods.

“The partner members enable us to expand the reach of our crowd-sourced threat data to even more businesses and organizations enabling them to defend against modern day threats,” said Russ Spitler, vice president of product management at AlienVault.

Fahmida Y. Rashid is an accomplished security journalist and technologist. She is a regular contributor for several publications including iPCMag.com where she is a networking and security analyst.  She also was a senior writer at eWeek where she covered security, core Internet infrastructure and open source. As well, she was a senior technical editor at CRN Test Center reviewing open source, storage, and networking products. 

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