The problem that we experienced in the past was the difficulty to exchange information about (targeted) malwares and attacks within a group of trusted partners, or a bilateral agreement.
Even today much of the information exchange happens in unstructured reports where you have to copy-paste the information in your own text-files that you then have to parse to export to (N)IDS and systems like log-searches, etc...
- **central IOC database**: storing technical and non-technical information about malwares and attacks, ... Data from external instances is also imported into your local instance
- **correlation**: automatically creating relations between malwares, events and attributes
- **storing data** in a structured format (allowing automated use of the database for various purposes)
- **export**: generating IDS, OpenIOC, plain text, xml output to integrate with other systems (network IDS, host IDS, custom tools, …)
Exchanging info results in *faster detection* of targeted attacks and improves the detection ratio while reducing the false positives. We also avoid reversing similar malware as we know very fast that others already worked on this malware.
Some people might think about CIF, the collective intelligence framework, however both tools are different. Perhaps integration might be provided between those two in the future.