Last week, Sanford Wallace, the self-styled "Spam King" confessed and was found guilty of hacking into numerous Facebook accounts and posting at least 27 million spam messages within three months. This highlighted an ongoing Facebook initiative called ThreatExchange, which aims to combat spamming and other cybercrimes by pooling together information from various companies within the social networking framework.
More than 90 organizations are now participating in ThreatExchange, covering technology, security, insurance, financial institutions, higher education, defense and ISP industries. The information sharing that transpires among these organizations yields an average of more than 3 million interactions on the platform every month, Facebook said in its most recent announcement.
The intelligence gathered complements - for participating organizations - a capability to corroborate and warn each other against hacking activities as well as other online threats. "We want to be able to disrupt these things more frequently," Mark Hammell, from Facebook's Threat Infrastructure unit, told CNET.
Security experts recognize information-sharing as critical in solving hacking, spam, phishing and other cyber crimes. However, this has not been tried before because organizations are wary of cyberespionage, customer lawsuits and losing competitive advantage, according to CNET. Facebook supposedly solves the problem by functioning as a neutral platform so that these concerns are eliminated.
Facebook's algorithm can spot data patterns and user behavior and it has a tried and tested capability to manage dynamic communities of interest. These variables are also crucial in finally realizing a cybercrime-fighting consortium, Network World reported.
