The Telco Security Alliance bolsters threat detection capabilities through shared intelligence

Dallas, Singapore and Madrid, February 18th,2020 – The Telco Security Alliance today announced new collaborative efforts designed to further enhance the ability to detect and eliminate threats from customer environments. Members of the alliance -- AT&T, Singtel and Telefónica – are working together, continuously sharing the latest threat intelligence and indicators of compromise (IoCs) related to cybersecurity threats and global attack campaigns so they can help organizations remain resilient as the threat landscape evolves. We believe this to be the first-of-its-kind collaboration among telecommunication providers’ security organizations.

Telco Security Alliance threat intelligence is derived from multiple sources including anonymized data from alliance member security operations centers and security investigations. By pooling valuable information on new malware campaigns and indicators of compromise from ongoing attacks, our customers gain a more global and complete view of cybersecurity developments that may impact operations.

Joint threat intelligence sharing will allow our security analysts to take more proactive means to combat malicious activities. We will accomplish this by writing and pushing signatures for newly discovered malware and phishing campaigns across customer products and environments down to individual endpoints. The different feeds serving the threat intelligence instruments will utilize the AT&T Alien Labs® Open Threat Exchange® (OTX™) platform.

The Telco Security Alliance formed by AT&T, Etisalat, Singtel, SoftBank and Telefónica, is the first global security alliance between telecom operators. The alliance aims to improve each member’s ability to respond rapidly to cybersecurity threats. The Telco Security Alliance aims to help enterprises and government agencies address the growing threat of cyber-attacks and the evolving threat landscape. AT&T, Singtel and Telefónica are the first Telco Security Alliance members to participate in the threat intelligence sharing initiative but expansion to other members is planned.

“Access to global actionable threat intelligence has become increasingly crucial as cyber threats traverse sovereign boundaries,” said Chng Tien San, Global Head of Alliances at Trustwave, a Singtel company. “Trustwave helps enterprises perform continuous threat detection and response, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with the Telco Security Alliance as we collectively help businesses embrace digital transformation securely.”

“Our customers demand us to deliver contextualized threat intelligence, delivering as many details as possible to reveal undetected attacks. By leveraging the Alliance members’ most relevant IoCs into one single platform, it will allow us to improve our detection and response, and the emerging playbooks will let our analysts focus on the analysis and investigations of the advanced threat defeating techniques,” said Sebastián García de Saint-Léger, Telco Sector manager at ElevenPaths, Telefónica’s cybersecurity unit.

“This relationship supports the global fight against cybercrime,” said Jaime Blasco, AVP of Product Development for AT&T Cybersecurity. “This initiative already proved valuable to AT&T’s visibility into current threats, and as we continue to work together, our focus is on utilizing this relationship to deliver better threat intelligence to our customers.”