Cisco, Fortinet cosy up to NATO for infosharing

Fortinet and Cisco have signed data-sharing arrangements with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to try and improve their respective infosec capabilities.

The NATO Communications and Information Agency will be sharing cyber security trend information with the two partners.

It will also support bilateral exchange of non-classified information about the nature, scope, prevention and mitigation of attacks.

In other words, NATO and its partners will get to know things not shared with the press, like how many of the “trillions” of attacks reported by companies with a security product to sell are merely ICMP pings of no significance whatever.

Everybody's kind of vague about exactly what will happen under the agreements, as befits a security partnership, but Fortinet at least explains that the aim is to “identify and chase the adversary and their campaign playbooks”.

Cisco is more discreet, running up a blog post that says nearly nothing at all.

NATO's Industry Cyber Partnership, the body the two vendors have signed on with, was first proposed in 2014 and formally created last year.

Earlier this month, the NCI A also signed an info sharing agreement with the European CERT. ®