As organizations become more security conscious, they begin to understand that they are not alone with regard to the threats they face. In addition, these organizations learn that the intrusion attempts they are seeing are not isolated to them. What you may discover is that organizations all over the world battle similar attacks. For this reason, Check Point integrated the ability to share your log information with the DShield Storm Center (www.dshield.org). In addition, the storm center can send information about current threats and your firewall may invoke blocking lists based on this communication.

With the common threat model that everyone faces, professionals in all aspects of information security have begun to push for broad information sharing among organizations (corporate and government alike). In 2000, Euclidian consulting launched the DShield Storm Center to begin correlating worldwide traffic profiles to detect attacks. Soon thereafter, SANS (www.sans.org) joined the fray and began contributing to DShield Storm Center. As such, this engine is now the basis for the SANS Internet Storm Center. The aim of this effort is to combine network traffic that organizations see for the sake of consolidating these individual traffic models into one large model. From this point, automated systems discern similar traffic patterns and determine whether they are malicious in nature. In simplest terms, DShield Storm Center is a global correlation engine, which relies on you, other organizations, and its own population of collection engines for data. Everyone gains from sharing this type of information. The...