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Facebook to launch social network for cyber security experts
Facebook is launching a social network for cyber security professionals to share information about threats that could lead to cyber attacks, as the US government and companies search for new ways to coordinate their defences.
The world’s largest social network is stepping up its work in cyber security by teaming with other technology companies including Yahoo and online scrapbooking site Pinterest. The platform will enable companies to share clues about how hackers are behaving in the hope of preventing security breaches.
As cyber attacks hit companies from Sony Pictures to health insurer
Anthem, the private and public sector are under pressure to work together to understand their adversaries. Hackers join forces and share tips to break into networks but so far, communication about cyber defence has often been haphazard.
Mark Hammel, Facebook’s manager of threat infrastructure, said
ThreatExchange had been developed from a system that Facebook was already using internally to make it easier to catalogue threats to the site in real time.
Facebook’s decision to share the tool comes at a time when the company is trying to broaden its appeal beyond social interactions with friends and family and make the product a tool that is useful in the workplace. The company is also trying out a site and app called
Facebook at Work, designed to facilitate internal collaboration between colleagues.
Mr Hammel said Facebook would give the cyber security service away for free, unlike some other threat detection systems.
“We feel that as our product’s footprint has grown, with the number of people using it to communicate, we have the ability to spend more time on broader security issues that affect the internet,” he said. He added Facebook was “really well positioned” with its “social sharing model” to direct a threat project such as this.
He added that Yahoo and Pinterest were good initial partners because they faced similar threats and had sizeable user bases. “Together, we’re protecting a pretty sizeable percentage of the internet,” he said.
The ThreatExchange comes after Barack Obama, US president, put information sharing at the heart of his cyber security proposals announced ahead of the State of the Union speech last month. He
