IBM TIEs up with McAfee to handle cyber threats

Combining systems should lower response times

Cybersecurity company McAfee has announced an integration with IBM, which enables the latter's customers to make use of McAfee's services.

McAfee is integrating IBM Resilient's Incident Response Platform (IRP) with its own Data Exchange Layer (DXL). Through this partnership, Resilient IRP users will be able to query McAfee's Threat Intelligence Exchange (TIE) as a threat reputation service.

In addition, the Resilient IRP now also natively connects to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. McAfee says that this improves orchestration by lowering response times and increasing the volume of threats that security teams can respond to with automation and intelligence sharing.

D.J Long, VP of strategic business development at McAfee, said that the integration of these systems, "will enable better security intelligence, faster response times and empower security teams to handle threats using automated tasks."

McAfee Labs' latest Quarterly Threats Report shows 63.4 million new malware samples being discovered in Q4'17: a 32 per cent on-quarter increase. The rising number of threats means that it is more difficult for security teams to stay on top of them. The skills gap also presents a challenge, with 35 per cent of cybersecurity professionals saying that they cannot maintain an adequate staff of trained professionals.

"As security threats become both more numerous and complex, it's more critical than ever to orchestrate these systems putting the right information, in front of the right person, at the right time and empowering them to act on it," said Ted Julian, VP of product management and co-founder of IBM Resilient.

The integration of the Resilient IRP and DXL, McAfee TIE and McAfee ePO is now generally available and can be found on the IBM Security App Exchange.