Europol has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with non-profit the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) which will see the two team up to improve security and reduce cyber risk among global organizations.
The two entities will offer best practice advice and recommendations, and exchange information on industry trends and initiatives.
Plus, the GCA has now signed up to the anti-ransomware project: No More Ransom.
The two are said to be focusing initial efforts on improving DMARC adoption to drive up email security standards.
The Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance protocol serves a valuable purpose in helping protect against phishing and spam by authenticating incoming messages.
That’s why the UK government mandated that the strongest DMARC policy (“p=reject”) be the default for its email services from 1 October 2016.
HMRC claimed in November that the service had helped it and email service providers block an impressive 300 million phishing emails so far that year.
Europol and the GCA will also be active in promoting the Internet Immunity project – an initiative designed to take threat intelligence feeds from leading industry players and use them to block DNS resolution to known malicious domains.
Currently in a testing phase, it’s apparently based on a “global anycast open recursive privacy-enabled DNS infrastructure” built by consortium the Packet Clearing House (PCH).
Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, welcomed the partnership as a “critical development.”
“The partnership marks an opportunity for GCA to collaborate with European cyber experts and for members of Europol to learn about GCA and its innovative tools,” he added.
“As part of its core mission to reduce cyber vulnerability worldwide, GCA recently announced the release of powerful tools designed to combat phishing attacks and other cyber threats. These tools are free and available to organizations of any size, and it is my hope that through this partnership, others will be encouraged to develop and implement practical safeguards against malicious cyber activity.”
GCA chairman and Barclays global CISO, Troels Oerting, added that the MoU would strengthen the GCA’s ability to eliminate systemic cyber risk around the world.
“Organizations and law enforcement need to take a page from our approach – by sharing knowledge, methodologies, tools and best practices,” he argued.