Information sharing is an important security tool — especially for and among security practitioners (sharing incident logs, etc.). Unfortunately as things scale, information sharing regimes suffer as other imperatives begin to compete with security. Imperatives such as competitive pressures or proprietary concerns between security companies who don’t want to reveal their secret sauce.
Many anti-virus (A/V) companies use an information platform called VirusTotal — run by Google, the largest collection of industry analysis of computer viruses. But there is trouble. A number of newer technology security companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Cylance and CrowdStrike face losing access to the platform, accused of freeloading by older A/V companies such as Symantec and TrendMicro for not sharing their analysis (the secret sauce) of how they detected a virus or vulnerability.
Robust competition in the security software industry is critical for improving cybersecurity but overall things will get worse if information sharing breaks down.