Tenable, of Columbia, announced the creation of its new Research Alliance Program to share vulnerability information prior to public disclosure. This new intelligence sharing initiative aims to reduce the window of opportunity threat actors have to exploit newly-disclosed vulnerabilities, allowing security teams and system administrators to address attack paths before bad actors can take advantage.

AlmaLinux, Canonical, CIQ, GreyNoise and TuxCare are the five inaugural members of this growing network.

When a new vulnerability is disclosed, organizations are in a race against cyber attackers. Those tasked with securing the organization must work to identify if the flaw exists within their infrastructure, determine the risk it poses by identifying the attack paths it introduces and prioritize those weaknesses that pose the greatest threat, before either updating the software where a patch is available or taking mitigating action when this is not immediately feasible.

Establishing a framework for a network of technology partners to share vulnerability details in accordance with Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure best practices makes it more likely that software scripts (plug-ins) that find instances of the flaw can be developed, tested and deployed to coincide with public disclosure announcements.

This enables organizations to assess and remediate their environments on day zero. This means those tasked with vulnerability management don’t just have the same intelligence as threat actors, but are armed to take action to find and fix flaws before an attacker can exploit them.