The year has been marked by increasing cybercrime, numerous major global cyber attacks, and steadily rising risk to our critical infrastructure. Industry experts know these trends will only continue to worsen. Never has the need been greater for cybersecurity leaders to join forces to mitigate the major risks that malicious cyber activity poses to every company.
The Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) is specifically dedicated to this purpose. Together, CTA’s members make up a community of peers within the cybersecurity industry that collaborate to help make the internet a safer place. Our 14 current members include cybersecurity companies from around the world that are involved in every part of the industry. The heart of CTA’s mission is to share threat information and then use that information in order to improve defenses against advanced cyber adversaries across member organizations and their customers. Ultimately, our goal is to make it more expensive and difficult for those adversaries to succeed.
While our 14 members represent a broad swath of the ecosystem, we know that we need to continue to grow to achieve our goal. Therefore, we are always looking for new members to join CTA. Our membership is open to the global cybersecurity community and is based on transparent, objective criteria. In keeping with this broad, eco-system wide mission, we have developed a robust membership consideration process. All members must meet baseline criteria:
- Be eligible to conduct business in the U.S.
- Have threat intelligence to submit to CTA
- Maintain the technical capability to share and receive threat intelligence to/from the CTA platform
- Be free from undue influence from government affiliations (other than customer relationships) that is contrary to the Alliance’s purpose
From there, the membership process involves signing a non-disclosure agreement, reviewing our membership agreements, and completing a thorough application. The application is evaluated by a committee made up of current member companies to ensure that the applicant meets the baseline criteria, will contribute to our mission, and their overall business practices mesh with our purpose and ethics. Although the CTA President provides input, the final decision regarding membership rests with the Board of Directors. We rely on this process for any company or organization that applies to CTA.
Ultimately, CTA’s membership process reflects our mission and our ethos: it’s an open, transparent, collaborative approach to tackling one of the key problems of our age — cybersecurity. We’re building the community in the cybersecurity industry so that we can do our part in this effort. If you’d like to join our community, have cybersecurity leaders on speed dial and participate in timely, actionable information sharing, click here to fill out a form and start a conversation with us: https://www.cyberthreatalliance.org/membership/membership-form/