Threat intelligence, information sharing and cyber training

As cyber threats have increased, more organizations need access to the latest threat intelligence. Business leaders and cybersecurity professionals of all sectors have recognized the need to communicate more efficiently.

I’m excited to announce the launch of the Texas Bankers Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (Texas Bankers ISAO). This has been a special project of mine for quite some time, and my hope is that our community banks will take pride in this new portal because it was really built for you and cannot be successful without you.

We have a very close-knit group of bankers facing the same cyber threats and risks, and it’s very evident through our peer-to-peer collaboration portal (Slack) that they all want to help each other address these risks.

Our ISAO was formed to identify and disseminate information about cybersecurity threats to our banking community. Our members receive threat intelligence, will be able to share information with each other in a more efficient and effective manner and get quality, relevant and cost effective cyber training.

Membership is open to all of our community banks with no membership dues, and the tools provided are free to use for our members. Those receiving the most value will be bankers responsible for information technology and/or cybersecurity.

Threat intelligence

Being able to help bankers identify the techniques attackers use to compromise security is the foundation for our threat intelligence platform (TruStar). Threat intelligence should provide timely and relevant information that technology, cyber professionals and even managed service providers can take action on.

Another key component that we’ve recently added is IACINet. This launches our ISAO into another level. The value and benefits our members receive from this partnership are truly remarkable. I’m like a kid at Christmas with all this new information and technology.

A great example of how all these technologies and information sharing platforms work together to address risks recently occurred with our community banks. Many banks reported a particular phishing scam that appeared to spoof bank email addresses.

That information was reported into our Slack channel, which was then reported into our TruStar platform and then submitted to IACINet for a deep analysis. Within hours, our community banks had information that they could then act on to prevent the security event from occurring in their own environments.

Utilizing IACINet with TruStar, our community banks can:

• Ingest and operationalize intelligence from IACINet and 20-plus OSINT sources into their SIEM.
• Surface the most relevant intelligence by enriching historical incident data with external intelligence sources to make faster, more informed decisions about relevant threats.
• Search and navigate the latest reports to access meta information like the number of Indicators of Compromise, excerpts of report content, correlation counts, time of submission and other relevant high-level information.
• Visualize correlations from IACINet and OSINT data with intuitive UI and graph database technology.

Easily submit and share reports among IACI Collaborative Partners (members) with built-in automatic redaction features to remove sensitive PII.