As both a parent and a bit of a nerd, I have a lot of corny jokes in my arsenal that cover a wide range of topics including animals, food, science fiction and the like. One of my favorite jokes comes from my data science background: “I never metadata I didn’t like.” This joke has it all: wordplay, the spirit of a joke your uncle might tell and even a tangential “Star Trek” tie-in. It also relates to threat intelligence.

The evolution of threat intelligence

When the IBM X-Force Exchange (XFE) launched over two years ago, the platform capabilities solidly supported collaboration and security investigation workflow. Since then, agile development has built up an even more robust set of features to make both collaboration and investigations even easier.

Orchestrate Your Security Defenses to Optimize the Impact of Threat Intelligence

In the past few months, on-platform notifications have gotten more robust. A user who is not logged in to the X-Force Exchange will be notified of updates to major capabilities in the upper right corner by the bell icon. A logged-in user will see a number of additional notifications available, ranging from feature updates to content and collaboration updates.

In addition to new capabilities, new content notices, such as groups to which you’ve been added or collections that have been shared with you, will be highlighted on the notifications page. The platform also displays recently published data from the IBM X-Force Research team.

Customizing the X-Force exchange experience

These public X-Force collections and advisories are incredibly helpful for security analysts because they provide ready-made, validated research and indicators of compromise (IoCs) for active campaigns such as the recent WannaCry and Petya malware outbreaks. Once viewing the collection, you can follow it to get on-platform notifications when new content is added or the notes are updated. You can even subscribe to off-platform notifications by adjusting the user settings on XFE if you’d like to be emailed when followed collections are updated.

By customizing the X-Force Exchange experience, you can ensure that you are receiving the content you need to facilitate investigations and remediation actions. Watch our on-demand webinar on maximizing the impact of threat intelligence to learn more about the platform and its capabilities.