Facebook Announces ThreatExchange: A Platform For Security Threat Information Exchange

Facebook has built an API-based platform for sharing security threat information. The platform titled ThreatExchange is based upon the social networking giant’s own threat analysis framework called ThreatData. Facebook built ThreatExchange on the existing Facebook platform infrastructure and added APIs on top of it so that its partner organisations can post information and search for available threats. While Facebook encourages its partners to share information on the public domain, it is also aware that some companies might not be willing to share details about security threats to the public. Facebook has addressed this issue by implementing privacy restrictions that makes sure the company remains selective about the information they share and who gets to view it.


Facebook decided to build ThreatExchange in light of a certain event last year. Various online service providers including itself had come together to discuss a botnet that was spreading malware-based spam. Once these companies started sharing information among themselves, they found out that the parts of the botnet were hosted on servers of respective companies and they quickly got rid of it. Facebook noticed that when companies have the complete information about a threat they were able to deal with it easily.

Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo participated in early trials of the ThreatExchange. Once the platform was in the beta, Bitly and Dropbox signed up for the service. Facebook is currently inviting other companies to join the initiative by signing up on the #-Link-Snipped-#.

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