Facebook has launched a new platform for companies to share information on security threats aimed at facilitating industry collaboration against hacking. The initiative is the latest in a string that the social networking juggernaut introduced over recent years to encourage cooperation on key technology trends.

It all started in 2011 with the Open Compute Project, a consortium that Facebook created to share the custom hardware designs powering the world’s largest data centers – including its own – with the outside world. Mark Zuckerberg’s firm followed up the initiative last year with the launch of a sister group aimed at driving the adoption of open-source software, another key component in web-scale environments, among traditional enterprises.

ThreatExchange, as the latest community effort from Facebook is called, marks something of a departure from its previous endeavors in the sense that it revolves around a specific technology. The platform at the heart of the initiative is based on the service of the same name that the social network’s engineers use to quickly share security issues internally, which is the kind of collaboration that it’s meant to foster among members of the broader industry.

Cooperation is especially important when it comes to security since hackers often reuse malware for different targets. The notorious Target Corp. breach that compromised the personal data of 70 million individuals, for one, employed a variant of a memory scraper that saw extensive use in the months leading up to the breach and likely could have been neutralized had the retail giant reacted faster.

Another threat that the exchange could help address is coordinated attacks against multiple targets, which are naturally easier to identify and address with a full picture of the situation. Because of that, Facebook is encouraging organizations to upload any relevant information in their possession to its service, which automatically standardizes input into the broader repository to provide security professionals with unhindered access to the details they need.

ThreatExchange already has the backing of Twitter, Dropbox, Yahoo and a number of other major web companies. Facebook says that the service is open to “security professionals everywhere,” but may encounter challenges in gaining traction outside the hyperscale club.

The launch of the platform comes hot on the heels of the White House revealing plans to establish a new agency that will focus specifically on disseminating threat information in the private sector, which the Department of Homeland Security is already doing. Moreover, there are several commercial vendors operating services dedicated to the same purpose, including ThreatStream, which took in additional funding in December to expand its reach to more markets.

That adds up to a lot of competition for ThreatExchange, especially when taking into account the fact fact that a growing number of industries have their own specialized threat sharing coalitions. But the platform still has a gap left to fill in the web-scale segment, where public collaboration on security has so far been scarce.