Next month, the US Senate will consider a controversial cybersecurity bill that encourages and incentivizes private companies to share data with the federal government. Lawmakers introduced the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, in response to the massive and unrelenting barrage of high-profile, damaging cyber attacks against public and private sector entities over the past several years.
CISA has brought consideration of the importance of cybersecurity collaboration and threat information sharing to the forefront of discussions on how government agencies, private organizations, and individuals can better defend themselves against threats.
Amid these discussions, cyber collaboration company Comilion has announced a secure, decentralized and fully automated platform that enables secure and private bidirectional secured collaboration within and between organizations in tightly-regulated environments.
“Imagine a situation where enterprises are able to rapidly detect and share the information they are seeing,” Kobi Freedman, founder and CEO of Comilion, told Homeland Security Today. “Having the ability to investigate together, or share back and forth, creates a whole new level of visibility.”
“And if you are able to share not only the intelligence but also the assets of the weapons—for example malware which communicates in a specific pattern—you get a whole new level of defense. But coming to that point is not only a matter of technology, but of trust," Freedman said.
Freedman said there are three categories of challenges preventing successful cyber collaboration:
- Trust: Enterprises and individuals have a hard time trusting each other and their vendors. How do you create an ecosystem where enterprises who are not trusting each other can effectively collaborate?
- Effectiveness: Many organizations are overwhelmed by the amount of intelligence available.
- Regulation: Companies who want to share information are often inhibited by regulations and corporate policies.
Comilion designed the platform to overcome many of the major roadblocks associated with cyber threat collaboration, including governmental, compliance and corporate policy obstacles. Specifically, the platform alleviates security and privacy concerns, enables complete data ownership, and prevents data sharing that would violate industry regulations, geo-political legislation and corporate confidentiality policies.
“If you want to share information, then multiple regulations nowadays are limiting the potential of collaboration.” Freedman said. “If you take that to a global scale, it becomes even worse. We are creating a technology that confronts those challenges and provides the ability to collaborate in real-time on a global scale and in a formal manner.”
Although organizations have become increasingly aware of the importance of sharing threat information, many still rely on informal mechanisms of informing one another, such as by phone or email. Security experts are encouraging organizations to adopt a more formal collaboration mechanism to get the most out of community-based threat intelligence sharing.
However, a number of organizations hesitate to collaborate due to concerns that other companies will simply leech off them. This is a real problem. According to Freedman, “There are enterprises who want to be part of the collaboration scene but do not want to share anything. They want only to consume data, not to contribute.”
These roadblocks have created an impasse preventing successful cyber information sharing between and within companies and government agencies. In response, Comilion has introduced a platform that enables participants to maintain ownership of their data, avoid regulatory compliance violations, and only receive data that is relevant to their environment.
Freedman said Comilion’s cyber collaboration is set apart from the vast majority of similar services nowadays, which are basically intelligence providers. Rather than supplying the data, Comilion provides the infrastructure that supports information sharing. Comilion is completely on-premise.
In addition, the company also strongly promotes internal collaboration first and foremost, believing that the first step towards being able to collaborate with the external community is improving your own organization’s security posture by leveraging internal collaboration.
“We see ourselves as the infrastructure, rather than data vendor,” Freedman said. “We are creating the building blocks to sharing.”
