Net surfing becomes safer with Facebook's 'ThreatExchange'

Social networking site Facebook has launched a new platform for security professionals to exchange information about cyber threats with greater ease.

The platform, called ThreatExchange, is meant to be the place where researchers and professionals can learn from each other, and help keep everyone's systems safer, reported a news wesbite Mashable.

"Our goal is that organisations anywhere will be able to use ThreatExchange to share threat information more easily, learn from each other's discoveries, and make their own systems safer," Mark Hammell, Facebook's manager of threat infrastructure, wrote in a blog post announcing the project.

So far, many big names in the internet world have joined Facebook on ThreatExchange, including Bitly, Dropbox, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter and Yahoo. The platform expects to attract more partners in the coming months.

The new platform builds on Facebook's ThreatData, a framework that stores cyber threat information (such as bad URLs) for analysis by security pros.

The idea for ThreatExchange came about a year ago, when Facebook and others were facing a malware spam attack. The social network's security specialists "quickly learned that sharing with one another was key to beating" the problem, Hammell wrote.

To quell any fears that potential partners may have about sharing too much information publicly, Facebook said participants can tweak settings to pick and choose with whom they share their information.

For example, a company may only want to share sensitive data with another partner that is experiencing the same attack.

Currently, ThreatExchange is in beta, but for those interested in participating, there's a sign-up form over on its website.