The Cyber Threat Alliance, an organization founded by leading tech companies in 2014 to drive a coordinated industry effort against cyberadversaries, has appointed a former Obama Administration official as its first appointed president and added two new prominent corporate members.

Michael Daniel takes on the position of president after having spent four and a half years in the position of cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to President Barack Obama between June 2012 and July 2016. He also served 11 years as the chief of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

A professional policy wonk who studied at Princeton and Harvard, Daniel was previously described as being unknown by IT thought leaders before taking on the role in the Obama Administration where he led the development of a government-wide cyber policy and the implementation of that policy.

On the membership side, the CTA has also announced that its ranks have expanded, with Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc. joining as full members alongside existing members Symantec, Fortinet, McAfee (Intel Security), Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Telefonica and Barracuda. Joining the CTA as new affiliate members are IntSights, Rapid7 and RSA Security LLC, which joined Eleven Paths and ReversingLabs in that position.

With Daniel now sitting at its head, the CTA has also announced the development and rollout of a new, automated threat intelligence-sharing platform that enables members to integrate real-time, actionable intelligence into their products to better protect global customers. The group claims that the new platform better organizes and structures threat information into Adversary Playbooks, pulling everything related to a specific attack campaign together in one place to increase the contextual value, quality and usability of the data.

In short, what the sharing platform delivers is the ability to members to share intelligence about new cyber threats, meaning that all their products can be updated to combat them. Cisco Security Chief Architect Marty Roesch claims that the new platform is a way to “take the fight to the bad guys for the common good of the Internet.”

Image: Michael Daniel/LinkedIn