McAfee and Symantec join Cyber Threat Alliance

Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks, both original co-founders of the industry’s first cyber threat alliance, announced that McAfee and Symantec, have joined the alliance as co-founders.

The mission of the Cyber Threat Alliance is to drive a coordinated industry effort against cyber adversaries through deep collaboration on threat intelligence and sharing indicators of compromise.

While past industry efforts have often been limited to the exchange of malware samples, this new alliance will provide more actionable threat intelligence from contributing members, including information on zero-day vulnerabilities, botnet command and control (C&C) server information, mobile threats, and indicators of compromise (IoCs) related to advanced persistent threats (APTs), as well as the commonly-shared malware samples.

By raising the industry’s collective actionable intelligence, alliance participants will be able to deliver greater security for individual customers and organizations.

In addition to evolving the alliance framework and bylaws, co-founders Fortinet, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks and Symantec will each dedicate resources to determine the most effective mechanisms for sharing advanced threat data to foster collaboration amongst all alliance members and make united progress in the fight against sophisticated cyber adversaries.

“We must match our adversaries’ aggressive drive to innovate with our own deeper commitment to collaborate. It’s no longer enough to share and compare yesterday’s malware samples. As an industry, we need to understand and be poised to react to the latest complex and multidimensional attacks of today and tomorrow. This cyber alliance provides a critical framework for educating each other on the infrastructure and evolving tactics behind these attacks,” said Vincent Weafer, senior vice president for McAfee Labs, part of Intel Security.