NEC joins Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA)

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NEC Corphas announced its membership in the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that facilitates the sharing of cyber threat information among member companies in order to improve products and services and elevate security for customers.

Companies and organizations around the world are continually being faced with increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. As a result, it has become critical to enhance cross-sectional security measures through inter-enterprise and inter-organizational collaboration.

Recognizing this, in January 2017, six leading security companies (Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., Cisco, Fortinet, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks and Symantec) founded the CTA as a nonprofit organization, with the aim of generating and sharing cross-industrial, exhaustive and valuable threat information. Moreover, in February 2017, Michael Daniel, the former White House special assistant to the president, was appointed as the first CEO and president of the CTA. Currently, the CTA has a membership of 20 companies, including NEC.

CTA member companies can receive approximately 65,000 Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX) packages every day via the threat information-sharing platform operated by the CTA. STIX packages contain traces of threats, such as file hashes of malware and malicious domain names, and contextualized threat information, such as targeted attack campaigns and cyber adversaries. Members can use the information for their own analysis or to enhance their products and services.

For CTA member companies to receive threat information, they are required to provide their own threat information with a certain value based on algorithms specified by the CTA. Thus, they need to maintain the technologies to collect, analyze and evaluate their own threat information. With this approach, the CTA is enabling the sharing of cyber threat information that is mutually beneficial to member companies.

NEC said it will share information with the CTA and make use of the information it receives in order to develop cutting-edge security monitoring services and security-related products, aiming to contribute to building a safe, secure and rich society.

“As the number of available targets in cyberspace increases, we need a better understanding of where malicious actors are focusing their attacks, so we can focus our collective defense. Therefore, it’s encouraging to see more companies understand the urgency of this mission and commit to sharing their data to collaboratively combat malicious cyber activity. We’re excited to welcome our newest affiliate member NEC who will contribute to and benefit from the rich data sharing within the CTA,” said Daniel.

“Cybersecurity is a global issue. At NEC, our focus is on using information and communication technology to enrich people’s lives, and the CTA’s mission of securing the global digital ecosystem is inline with our vision of orchestrating a brighter world,” said Kazuhiro Sakai, Executive Vice President, CIO and CISO of NEC. “We look forward to elevating security throughout the world through our partnership with the CTA.”