IBM Security has announced a new project with the City of Los Angeles and the LA Cyber Lab to help local businesses collaborate to fight cybercrime.
The LA Cyber Lab, a non-profit providing threat intelligence to local businesses, will make two new free tools available; a threat information sharing platform and a mobile application for filtering suspicious emails – that leverages IBM Security threat intelligence.
According to the Centre for Strategic International Studies, the estimated global cost of cybercrime in 2018 was $600-billion.
One way to help protect against cyberattacks is via the use of threat intelligence that alerts businesses to ongoing cybersecurity threats and campaigns targeting a city or municipality.
Security operation centres or industry special interest groups routinely share this type of threat activity; however, it is rare to involve small and midsize businesses.
The City of Los Angeles and the LA Cyber Lab collaborated with IBM Security to build a complimentary platform where local businesses can share threat information, and where members of the community can then access that information and use it in their cyber defenses.
The centrepiece of IBM’s collaboration with the City of Los Angeles and the LA Cyber Lab is the new threat sharing platform called the LA Cyber Lab Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing Platform (TISP).
This platform makes it easy for citizens to share their spear-phishing concerns and educate themselves on the latest business email compromise (BEC) or ransomware campaigns. For example, if a user submits a suspicious email, the platform reviews the email and extracts key information to search 25+ common and unique data sources to indicate the level of risk.
IBM X-Force is one of the data sources used to supply the risk level. IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) takes this one step further, by correlating key information to the associated threat group and their latest attack campaign.
IBM Security teamed up with enterprise intelligence management platform, TruSTAR, to develop the cloud-based platform. LA Cyber Lab worked with partners for this platform including the City of Los Angeles, City National Bank, IBM – as well as municipalities and services including the utilities, financial, healthcare, entertainment, and critical infrastructure sectors.
These partners will share threat insights about cyberattacks, business email compromise (BEC) data and phishing to assist businesses in the LA-area functioning without proper cybersecurity resources.
LA Cyber Lab also designed a mobile application that any citizen can use to submit and analyse suspicious emails to determine their risk, and if they are phishing related. This information will also help enrich the threat information on the active threats targeting businesses in Los Angeles, delivered via the threat sharing platform.