Peter A Clarke

On March 20, 2024, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) announced that it had partnered with Microsoft to develop a Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing (CTIS) plug-in for the Microsoft Sentinel platform. The CTIS is a two-way sharing platform enabling government and industry partners to receive and share information about malicious cyber activity.

Businesses using Sentinel can join and contribute to this CTIS platform as long as they become an ASD Cyber Security Network Partner.

Microsoft is no stranger to data breaches. Hackers breached its Exchange Online accounts in November 2023. In 2022 a misconfigured Microsoft server exposed some of its customers’ sensitive information. There have been other data breaches which is not surprising given Microsoft is a ubiquitous system used by many businesses in first world countries and there have been many vulnerabilities in its systems over the years. Similarly governments haven’t been immune from vulnerability. The Cyber Crime Center of the US Department of Defence recently announced that it had just processed the 50,000th vulnerability reported to it since it created its Vulnerability Disclosure Program in 2016.

The press release provides:

The Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD’s) Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing (CTIS) is a two-way sharing platform that enables government and industry partners to receive and share information about malicious cyber activity at machine speed.

ASD’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has partnered with Microsoft to develop a CTIS plugin for Microsoft Sentinel. If your business is using Sentinel, you can now join and contribute to ASD’s CTIS platform. This will enable your business to receive and share threat intelligence with ASD and other industry partners, and better protect your business and customer data from cyber threat actors.

The cyber threat to Australia is continually growing and changing. Data from the latest ASD Cyber Threat Report shows a cybercrime is reported every 6 minutes, and costs to businesses impacted by cybercrime continue to rise. Collaboration across industry, business and government is key to making Australia a tough cyber target.

Proactive cyber threat intelligence sharing builds resilience across organisations to lift our national cyber defences, enabling organisations to stay ahead of cyber threats.

The ability to connect ASD’s CTIS and Microsoft’s Sentinel platforms enables ASD to build online resilience and counter the cyber threats we collectively face.