AlienVault  launches Beta version of Open Threat Exchange 2.0

AlienVault has introduced the beta release of Open Threat Exchange™ (OTX) 2.0. OTX 2.0 is leading the industry to shift from its traditional contribution-based model for sharing threat intelligence to a community engagement-based model for more collaborative defense. OTX 2.0 will enable everyone in the OTX community to actively discuss, explore, validate and share the latest threat data, trends, techniques and research – strengthening their own defenses while helping others to do the same. OTX 2.0 will be previewed in the company’s booth (#1807) at RSA, April 20-23.

In 2012, AlienVault OTX was one of the industry’s first crowd-sourced threat intelligence-sharing systems, enabling organizations to more rapidly be alerted to malicious threat actors and more proactively defend systems. As OTX has grown to now support more than 26,000 participants in over 140 countries contributing more than 1 million threat indicators daily, AlienVault has moved to develop OTX 2.0 on a foundation of a social networking architecture.

Over the last year, the OTX partner member program – now with 19 member companies – has provided access to the world’s largest crowd-sourced and collaborative threat exchange, enabling partners to utilize the AlienVault OTX API and gain the ability to define and evolve the future of sharing. New partner members include: Bit9 + Carbon Black, Blueliv, Brinqa, Centripetal Networks, Columbus Business Solutions – a Cable & Wireless Communications company, Fujitsu SSL,Immediate Insight, NopSec, RiskSense, ThreatStream, T-Systems Austria and Ziften.

“When we first released Open Threat Exchange, our goal was to deliver an open threat intelligence-sharing network that put effective security measures within the reach of all organizations,”said Barmak Meftah, president and CEO of AlienVault.“As others in the industry have developed threat intelligence offerings that support that vision, our goal for OTX 2.0 is to move the needle on how threat intelligence data is shared, making it more collaborative and engaging in order to build a stronger security community working in unison to stop cyber attacks.”

With the beta release of OTX 2.0, users will gain access to real-time threat intelligence, with the ability to import and export indicators of compromise for security tools via an open API, as well as collaborate with researchers and other members of the security community. The innovative user interface provides OTX 2.0 users with easy-to-follow, collaborative research and alerts for threat intelligence in an accurate, real-time manner. Users can create or subscribe to an existing“Pulse,” an analysis of a particular threat that provides a summary of the impact, as well as get a view into the software targeted and related indicators of compromise used to detect threats. With its open access, OTX 2.0 will strengthen the security community’s ability to work together to protect all organizations from malicious and sophisticated attacks.

Additional features in OTX 2.0 beta include:
OpenCommunity: Provides open access to the community of threat researchers and security professionals to enable collaborative research, provide access to threat intelligence, and automate the process of updating security infrastructure with the latest threat intelligence.

Simple Exporting of Threat Intelligence: An automated process lets users update their security infrastructure with the latest threat intelligence by subscribing to a “Pulse,”upon which their systems will automatically update local security products or export Pulses into open formats such as STIX, JSON, OpenloC, MAEC and CSV, among others for more simplified threat mitigation.

In addition to OTX 2.0, AlienVault today also announced the launch of Unified Security Management (USM) 5.0, the latest version of its all-in-one security platform designed and priced to ensure that mid-market organizations can effectively defend themselves against emerging threats on day one. The news of USM 5.0 and OTX 2.0 comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of USM for Amazon Web Services (AWS). USM for AWS is AlienVault’s first cloud-based solution aimed at supporting organizations with an AWS-environment with the means for managing security in the cloud.