AlienVault, the leading provider of Unified Security Management (USM) and crowd-sourced threat intelligence, today announced the latest version of its Open Threat Exchange (OTX), the world's first truly open threat intelligence community that enables collaborative defense with actionable, community-powered threat data. AlienVault will demonstrate OTX and AlienVault USM, the company's comprehensive threat detection and incident response solution, at Black Hat (booth #1016), which will take place August 3-4, 2016 in Las Vegas.

With this release, OTX members can now create private communities and discussion groups, where they can share threat information with only members of the group. This capability enables more targeted, in-depth discussion and threat information distribution related to specific industries, particular regions and types of threats. This new feature supports the mission of Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) pursuant to Presidential Decision Directive-63 (PDD-63) by providing a platform for information sharing and risk mitigation for specific groups and teams. In addition, managed service providers can use this feature to distribute threat data to their subscribers.

OTX data works hand-in-hand with security platforms, such as AlienVault USM, to ensure users have the latest intelligence to identify, respond to and mitigate threats. As part of AlienVault's commitment to continually innovating and enabling even the smallest IT departments to detect and respond to threats more effectively, a new version of USM, with enhanced capabilities like USB detection, will also be available in early August.

"We are proud to have pioneered open threat intelligence sharing through our Open Threat Exchange," said Jim Hansen, vice president of product marketing at AlienVault. "Time and again, security professionals are discovering that by working together and pooling their threat data and expertise, they are able to better identify and respond more quickly to attacks. We are seeing this trend across industries and around the world, as more and more people realize that collaborative defense is the only way to get ahead of the attackers. With the addition of private groups, we are providing another innovative tool for distributing threat information to those who need it to protect critical systems."

Launched in 2012, OTX is modeled on social sharing technologies and allows security practitioners from around the world to openly research, discuss and collaborate on emerging threats. The effectiveness of collaborative defense increases with the number of contributors, and AlienVault's dynamic OTX community recently surpassed 47,000 users, who contribute approximately 4 million artifacts each day to the OTX community; of these, over 17,000 are actively participating in the collaborative OTX portal.

OTX User Community Feedback

"OTX helps our team focus on what we need to pay closer attention to and what we need to be watching for. The ability to see threat trends occurring in the world at-large, combined with AlienVault's tools, allows us to better protect our business by immediately alerting security teams to potential threats." - Stephen Molina, information security administrator at Save Mart Supermarkets

"OTX threat intelligence is a great complement to our other threat intelligence feeds to ensure we have as many 'eyes' as possible informing us of all the potentially malicious threat actors out there." - Farakh Hussain, information security manager at PriceMetrix Inc.