The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so the saying goes.
As the WannaCry ransomware attacks lit up the globe earlier this month, the security research teams at Cisco and IBM set up an open line of communication with one another as they scrambled, along with the rest of the world, to ascertain the digital worm’s damage and to prevent others from falling victim. Now the pair of companies is consummating the partnership.
Cisco and have decided to join forces to swap threat intelligence between their internal research groups when investigating major hacks moving forward. The two companies are also planning to add product integrations that connect their portfolios over the course of the year.
Security companies issue press releases to this effect all the time, striking up relationships among smaller upstarts. What makes this partnership notable is that it involves some of the biggest players in cybersecurity coming together.
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The two titans, whose security businesses amount to more than $2 billion apiece in revenues, plan to have their respective security research teams--Cisco’s Talos and IBM’s X-Force--coordinate as they dig into big security incidents, just as they did during the WannaCry onslaught. They believe that doing so will help them better respond to attacks and protect customers.
The teams are similar in size. Talos has about 300 people, and X-Force has “well over one hundred folks,” according to Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security.
In addition, the companies are making their security tools more interoperable. Though the two companies are rivals, they have rather complimentary security portfolios; Cisco dominates the cloud and networking side, while IBM reins over services, intelligence collection, and analytics.
The two companies believe that by linking their products, they will help alleviate stress faced by customers often overwhelmed by a plethora of options from smaller security vendors.
“There’s a dog’s breakfast of different tools they’re trying to throw at the security problem,” David Ulevitch, vice president of Cisco Security, said on a call. IBM and Cisco “work well together, so you don’t have that friction between capabilities.”
As part of the deal, Cisco said it would be build apps on IBM’s QRadar threat intelligence platform, a software tool used to manage the flow of information for analysts in security operations centers. Cisco plans to develop an app for Firepower, its network firewall product, and another for Threat Grid, a sandboxing tool that analyzes malware.