Company policies curbing threat intelligence sharing

Businesses love the idea of sharing information regarding data breaches among themselves, but rarely do so. Those are the results of the latest McAfee Labs Threat Report, published by Intel Security.

According to the report, 97 per cent of companies see value in sharing this data, but more than 50 per cent can’t do it, saying the company policy would not allow it.

Twenty-four per cent said there isn’t enough information on how the data would be used, and that that is the key barrier to the sharing of such intelligence.

“Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) sharing is a crucial strategy to ensure that enterprises across entire industries are able to learn from each other and set up proactive defences to safeguard both their corporations and the industry as a whole,” said Raj Samani, CTO EMEA at Intel Security. “In many cases, advanced stealthy attacks can lay hidden on a network, undetected. With corporations proactively sharing details of threats and attacks, similar enterprises will also be able to more rapidly detect threats and correct their systems. Detection and correction of a cyber-attack is just as important as the initial protection stage when safeguarding company and customer data.”

The report also suggests that, after slowing down for a while, ransomware is accelerating again. Last year was an important one for mobile malware, as Q4 saw a 72 per cent quarter-over-quarter increase in new mobile malware samples.

There is also good news – the number of new rootkit malwares continues its downward spiral which began in Q3 2011.

The full report can be found on this link.