What is Information Sharing in Cybersecurity?

As the name suggests, information sharing is when you share information with others. Imagine you own a small enterprise, and suddenly, that enterprise falls victim to a cyber threat. What would you do? You lack the resources and computer security, and slowly but surely, your system infrastructure will get into the control of cybercriminals.

Small enterprises have no choice but to search for platforms that share information relevant to the problem they’re facing. Fortunately, there are information-sharing communities out there that share valuable information on how to defend against cyber threats, resulting in organizations promptly learning and implementing strategies.

It is critical in the world that we’re in today, and in this article, we’re going to understand what information sharing is, its best practices, its benefits, and its challenges.

Understanding Information Sharing in Cybersecurity

What is Information Sharing?

Information Sharing is when stakeholders share with each other critical information about cyberattacks and vulnerabilities to plan, process, and develop cybersecurity measures. That’s because one organization alone can’t identify and mitigate all cyber attacks. However, it’s important to note that it must be secure, trusted, and scalable as it’s the main foundation on which all stakeholders and cybersecurity communities depend.

These cybersecurity communities and stakeholders use the knowledge collected by other experienced individuals to gain a better understanding of cyber threats. Their goal is simple–sharing vital information about different cyber attacks and strengthening each other’s security infrastructure.

Examples of Information Sharing in Cybersecurity

To understand how information sharing works, we’ll look at an example of information sharing among the Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), the government, and its members.

However, before we get into more details of Information Sharing in Cybersecurity, let’s understand what exactly ISACs are. ISACs were first introduced in the United States in 1998 they dealt with critical infrastructure vulnerabilities and helped protect organizations from cyber threats through sharing important information within an industry.

Under the same branch, the Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs) were established by former President Barack Obama. Now that we have an idea of what ISACs and ISAOs are, let’s look at an example.

Suppose the government encounters suspicious activity intelligence from an ISAC member’s cyber-system, thereby it will instruct the member to take necessary actions from an ISAC operations center to spread the intelligence to other members. In another case, an ISAC member would discover unusual activity in its systems and immediately inform the operation center. The center would recommend that the member contact the government to get support. Once this takes place, then the government shares its intelligence on the incident with other members.

However, while ISACs are devoted to offering safe, fair, and valuable information-sharing mechanisms, the participation rates are disappointing due to the fact that the misgivings and risks involving information-sharing outweigh the benefits it.

As mentioned earlier, ISAO allows organizations to securely analyze and share sensitive data about cybersecurity attacks, threats, risks, and incidents. While ISACs can only share information with their members within the critical infrastructure industry, ISAOs can share information among other industries.

Unlike ISACs, ISAOs’ communication is customizable as it offers flexible approaches to different types and categories of organizations such as small businesses across various sectors like legal, consulting firms, accounting, and firms that support cross-division clients, to name a few.

The information shared by ISACs and ISAOs is crucial, real-time, and context-driven. With this powerful collaboration, data is shared frequently and quickly, enabling organizations to protect themselves from cyber threats. Despite ISAOs structure being more accommodating to other industries and the preferences of its members, both ISACs’ and ISAOs’ idea is that security is important.

ISACs and ISAOs emphasize the need for collaboration and information sharing to improve an organization’s security posture through exchanging and receiving threat information with people who share the same objectives–to protect their system infrastructure. Additionally, it can easily help individuals and communities to implement strategies that would mitigate cyber threats and attacks.

Information Sharing Benefits

Information sharing provides an efficient response to novel threats. Sharing information can reduce the risk of cyber attacks, help cybersecurity arbitrators to acquire optimal defense, and enable organizations to work in harmony to maintain security on both individual and national levels.

Furthermore, it can be divided into various categories depending on the types of information divulged.

1. Reduced damage: It can help organizations discover security breaches quicker and reduce damage triggered by cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
2. Reduced cybersecurity events: It can enhance the collective response to new threats, lowering the likelihood of adversaries gathering information from organizations and reducing the exploitation of such information to launch attacks on other agencies, thereby preventing cascading effects on a system, industry, or sector.
3. Effective response to cyber threats: It ensures that all organizations are aware of the many threats in the digital landscape, and have a deeper understanding of how cybercriminals perform, their tricks, methods, and procedures, and how they can defend themselves against these constantly changing threats.
4. Simplify Procedures: It may help streamline the administrative procedure and accelerate the handling of information, ensuring stakeholders in the information-sharing system respond promptly when confronting cyber attacks.
5. Reduced cost: It can remove the duplication of costs and efforts, or even grant organizations to defend against cyber attacks by developing solutions without the need of collating all necessary resources. It’s important to note that the capability of information sharing is only significant when the size of the network where the information is being shared is sufficiently large.

At the end of the day, prominent organizations may benefit more from information sharing than organizations that have a lower chance of being exploited or attacked.

Information Sharing Challenges

Businesses–big and small, or public and private encounter challenges in determining how to share information without involving risks or revealing critical cyber intelligence, jeopardizing the overall security posture. Moreover, the public and private sectors struggle with specific guidelines to share information with each other in a manner that’s relevant and prevents noise.

These challenges include:

1. There are many liabilities and compliance issues about sharing information with other parties–especially competitors or government authorities outside of regulators.
2. The information would differ due to the vast number of industries and sectors with different segments.
3. A huge challenge is the lack of trust and communication among people who share. People only trust professionals, verifiable experts, and stakeholders who have an adequate balance between sharing and receiving information.
4. There are legal and privacy concerns surrounding information sharing.
5. Organizations and stakeholders aren’t able to embrace matters that may seem new or unfamiliar to them such as information sharing. Additionally, incompetent technology or lack of technical knowledge may result in an unsuccessful information-sharing effort due to it being difficult or inefficient.

Information Sharing Best Practices

Organizations should follow a unified approach that goes beyond their own security measures to effectively defend themselves against complex and persistent threats. Information sharing is one of the most powerful strategies to improve cybersecurity defenses by taking advantage of the knowledge and understanding of the cybersecurity community.

Let’s explore some of the best practices for efficient information sharing, enabling organizations to have a strong, secure, and reliable security system to prevent cyber threats.

1. Streamline Information Sharing Process: To optimize and streamline the information sharing process, organizations should use advanced tools and technology that is capable of sharing information among other organizations securely and efficiently. By utilizing automated processes, information can be gathered from various sources, thereby going through the process of data enrichment and normalization before it spreads the most relevant information to trusted stakeholders. This reduces the crevices for cybercriminals to attack.
2. Secure Collaboration: It’s essential for organizations to implement strong access controls to ensure that sensitive information is only exchanged to authorized individuals or businesses. This helps prevent misuse of data and maintain confidentiality.
3. Information Sharing Rules: Additionally, it’s important to have rules to prevent the distribution of information that may result in negative consequences if shared improperly for not just organizations, but its customers and partners too. The rules should include how trustworthy the recipient should be, how sensitive the data shared is, and the potential impact of sharing or withholding different types of information.
4. Scope of Information Sharing: Organizations should be consistent with their resources and objectives. Their main goal should be to offer the most valuable information to other organizations and stakeholders. The scoping activity should identify the types of information a stakeholder authorizes, the conditions under which sharing the information is permissible, and with whom they can and should share the information.
5. Collective Knowledge: Organizations can collaborate with trustworthy peers, industry partners, and verified information-sharing communities to take measures that would strengthen their threat intelligence capabilities and develop strategies, allowing them to evade a cybercriminal’s many tricks and techniques.
6. Actively Enrich Indicators: Organizations can increase the usefulness and efficiency of threat information by generating metadata for each indicator that it produces. Metadata gives context as to why the indicator is being used, how it should be interpreted, and how it’s associated with other indicators. There should be procedures in place for how one can publish and update indicators and associated metadata, and how one can retract incorrect information or information that has been shared unintentionally.
7. Information-Sharing Networks: Information-sharing networks offer organizations a safe space to share insights, work together, and fight cyber threats in unison. However, it’s important to adhere to specific guidelines such as establishing clear objectives, fostering mutual trust, and actively participating and collaborating to develop strong relationships and powerful information-sharing networks.

The Role of Information Sharing in Cybersecurity

Information sharing in cybersecurity is essential when an organization faces cyber threats–especially tailored for that particular organization. Such threats can be mitigated through collective action like sharing information. The shared information can consequently alert other organizations, allowing them the opportunity to prepare and defend themselves from these new methods and ever-evolving attacks from cybercriminals.

Information Sharing in a Collaborative Environment

Trust plays a major role in information sharing as it often starts with unplanned collaboration, especially during disasters where different sectors and competitors share a unified goal.

Ad hoc collaborations build trust over time and organizations have assurance that the parties will work as expected, in a sense that they will minimize harm and maximize security. Although challenging, organizations must pursue to sustain these ad hoc collaborations so that they can develop frameworks to not just establish trust but also actively collaborate and reduce the risk of cyber threats, while taking into account the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of information sharing.

Furthermore, organizations should create procedures that enable quick sharing of threat information while simultaneously satisfying their responsibilities for protecting sensitive information. Additionally, they can reduce confusion and increase support for information-sharing efforts within an organization and among its parties.

An organization’s procedures should consider and include various components like:

1. Recognize threat information that can be easily shared with trusted participants.
2. Protecting threat information that may hold confidential data.
3. Create a plan for addressing the leakage of sensitive information.
4. Automate the processing and sharing of threat information where feasible.
5. Explain how information handling designations are used, monitored, and imposed.
6. When necessary, allow for non-attributed information sharing.
7. Track both internal and external sources of threat information.

It can help organizations better manage cybersecurity risks by improving collaborations. These procedures not only allow for effective information sharing to key stakeholders but also enable collaboration with authorized external communities.

Information Sharing and Malware Detection

Information sharing is important for expanding the field of cybersecurity for everyone. The isolation and prevention of cyber-attacks require strong teamwork from other organizations. By quickly sharing crucial information about threats, attacks, and vulnerabilities, the scope and extent of cyber incidents can be reduced significantly. With proper procedures, strategies, and networks, information sharing can streamline incident response procedures and prevent or mitigate the impact of emerging cyber threats.

It can enhance the speed and accuracy of malware detection as it provides deeper context and evidence for determining and validating malicious samples across different networks. It can also improve collaboration and coordination among various security actors because it enables the sharing of knowledge and best practices for malware analysis.

To improve malware detection, the most useful methods for sharing threat information is joining ISACs, getting involved in government-run programs that allow data sharing, and developing formal agreements with trustworthy parties to securely share threat information.

Information Sharing Platforms: Enhancing Cybersecurity

Information-sharing platforms are widely available for the public as well as different industries and sectors like government bodies, educators, healthcare practitioners, and law enforcement to name a few. It’s difficult to manually go through tons of threat intel and compare and analyze them to generate intelligence. However, modern information-sharing platforms enable security teams to efficiently address these challenges by automating several processes like ingestion, normalization, correlation, enrichment, analysis, and dissemination of threat intelligence.

The new platforms enable a seamless sharing or receiving of threat intel from organizations, ISAC and ISAO members, stakeholders, subsidiary companies, and regulators. A high-quality information-sharing platform allows both analysis and distribution of tricks, methods and processes, threat actors, their methodologies, and events, to name a few.

All of this information is exchanged in real-time and in a format that machines can read through the Trusted Automated Exchange of Indicator Information (TAXII) and Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX). While both TAXII and STIX aren’t software or platforms–the former is an application layer protocol while the latter is a programming language–they are the building blocks and standards that make information digestible and shareable.

Information-sharing platforms generally consist of the following categories:

1. Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs)
2. Threat intelligence Platforms (TIPs)
3. Online Communities and Forums like Stack Exchange and Reddit
4. Governmental Alert Systems
5. Private Sector Cybersecurity Firms’ Feeds
6. Industry Collaborative Networks

Additionally, there are platforms like Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP), a free open-source software that allows information sharing of cybersecurity indicators and threats, and Threatvine Hub which is designed for safe cross-sector information sharing to securely handle cybersecurity events that make it efficient and beneficial.

Conclusion

Information sharing means a one-to-one exchange of information between a sender and receiver. There are many organizations that are unable to see the bigger picture and that lack the resources to make their security posture safe and secure from cyber threats and attacks.

However, with the help of information sharing, single entities or organizations can share vital and diverse information about various cyber threats, and develop strategies together to disrupt localized and regional threats and actors. At the end of the day, it’s about helping everybody secure their platforms across the ecosystem.

FAQs

1. What is information sharing in cybersecurity?

Information sharing in cybersecurity allows organizations to better comprehend the extent of threats and recognize potential indicators of compromise (IOCs). Information sharing allows organizations to strengthen their security measures and posture across different industries.

2. What are Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs)?

Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAO) is a reliable community that collaborates to detect and spread information about cybersecurity threats. ISAO focuses on offering technical information about threats to organizations, businesses, and governments. Additionally, they collect data about cybercriminals and their methods from different sources such as large and small enterprises, and cybersecurity organizations globally. It’s one of the trusted advisors in the cybersecurity industry as they deliver appropriate and beneficial information.

3. What are the best practices for information sharing in cybersecurity?

The best practices for information sharing in cybersecurity are to gain expertise by providing valuable and beneficial information, building strong trust through active participation and collaboration, cooperating with other organizations, and establishing clear rules to control the publication and distribution of threat information.

4. What challenges are associated with information sharing?

While information sharing is advantageous, it has its own challenges including but not limited to internal restrictions due to legal and privacy concerns, overwhelming information, lack of trust and communication among parties, lack of technical knowledge, and organizations being afraid to tread unfamiliar waters of information sharing.