Threat intelligence sharing

Threat intelligence sharing refers to the structured exchange of information about cyber threats—such as indicators of compromise (IOCs), tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), malware signatures, vulnerabilities, and attacker infrastructure—between governments, private firms, sector-specific bodies, and international partners. The goal is to shorten defenders' response times by making knowledge of one victim's incident actionable for potential next targets.

Sharing happens through several channels. Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) organize exchange within sectors like finance (FS-ISAC), energy (E-ISAC), and health (H-ISAC). Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs) were promoted in the United States by Executive Order 13691 (2015) to broaden participation beyond critical-infrastructure sectors. Government-to-industry sharing in the US is coordinated largely by CISA, which operates the Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS) program established under the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015). That statute provides liability protections for companies sharing cyber threat indicators in good faith.

Internationally, the EU's NIS2 Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) obliges essential and important entities to participate in voluntary information-sharing arrangements, and ENISA supports cross-border coordination. NATO operates the Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP), an open-source project originally developed by CIRCL in Luxembourg, now widely used by CSIRTs globally. Common technical standards include STIX (Structured Threat Information eXpression) and TAXII (Trusted Automated eXchange of Intelligence Information), both maintained by OASIS.

Persistent challenges include concerns over liability, exposure of proprietary data, privacy compliance (notably with the GDPR), classification barriers between intelligence agencies and the private sector, and the risk that low-quality or unverified indicators generate alert fatigue. Trust frameworks—often using the Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) to mark how widely information may be redistributed—are central to making sharing workable. For policy researchers, threat intelligence sharing sits at the intersection of national security, regulatory design, and public-private partnership.