Verizon [VZ]–one of the largest managed security services providers in the world–has pooled its cyber intelligence resources into a new center to enhance its security offerings.
The company started the center after noticing a “disturbing trend” over the decade since it began its annual Data Breach Investigations Report, said Chris Porter, the Verizon Cyber Intelligence Center’s (VCIC) managing principal.
“Attackers are getting faster at compromising and we are not improving in detection,” he said.
The report found that in 75-85 percent of attacks hackers were able to compromise systems in a few days, yet the systems’ owners were only able to detect the intrusion in a few days 15-25 percent of the time.
Intelligence from the VCIC will be available to enterprise customers, including federal agencies, that purchase Verizon’s security services. There are no plans to offer the intelligence as its own service. Porter said the center was built with the intention of enhancing Verizon’s existing and future services.
VCIC will host engineers, analysts and operations specialists previously segmented in different parts of the company.
“We needed to do better,” he said. “We needed to pull in our various assets and tools, people and technology that were scattered…and pull them together in one place.”
Porter said the vast amount of data that Verizon has access to differentiates the VCIC from other threat intelligence services. VCIC will collect data from across the company’s services and IP addresses as well as from law enforcement and hacks against Verizon’s own internal networks. The center will use the Verizon Enterprise Risk and Incident Sharing (VERIS) framework developed in its annual breach report as a common language for describing threats and distributing the information.