IBM, McAfee and Other tech firms are forming an alliance to Tackle Cyber threats

A group of cybersecurity firms led by McAfee and IBM has partnered to form an alliance known as Open Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA). The main objective of the collaboration is to solve the fragmentation and interoperability problems in the cybersecurity space. This is done by gathering ideas and solutions from people across the world and adding it to an open-source platform which can then be accessed by the members of the OCA. According to the alliance, IBM and McAfee will provide the initial open-source contents with guidance from OASIS, an international digital consortium.

Other than IBM and MacAfee, the companies, which include are Corsa, CyberArk, Advanced Cyber Security Corp, EclecticIQ, DFLabs, Indegy, Electric Power Research Institute, New Context, Cyber Eason, ReversingLabs,  Crowdstrike, Tufin, SafeBreach, Threat Quotient, and Syncurity. The main aim of OCA is to boost the development of code, tooling, practices, patterns, and open source content; and enhance the interoperability of cybersecurity solutions. Additionally, the companies will work on techniques to boost the sharing of information across vendors and their product lines.

Contributions have already begun to start the project. IBM created an open-source library called "STIX-Shifter" to give a standardized cybersecurity data model for the companies to identify information about various threats from its data reserve. To seamlessly exchange data between tools and products from any provider, McAfee added a cybersecurity messaging format in their OpenDXL Standard Ontology.