Five leading information technology (IT) vendors have announced the creation of the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI), a nonprofit organization that will enhance global IT security by proactively driving excellence and innovation in security response.

Founded by Cisco, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, and Microsoft, ICASI will provide a unique forum for global companies committed to proactively addressing complex, multi-product security threats and to better protecting enterprises, governments, and citizens, as well as the critical IT infrastructures that support them.

During the last few years, common Internet security threats have evolved from wide-reaching worms and viruses to more sophisticated, stealth attacks that may begin to simultaneously target multiple products or shared protocols in multiple products. ICASI will allow IT vendors to work together to address multi-vendor security threats. The consortium will provide a mechanism for international vendor and customer involvement, and allow for a government-neutral way of resolving significant global, multi-product security incidents.

The increasing sophistication of attacks and the integration of applications, now common in IT environments, pose real challenges for IT vendors. Online attacks occur more frequently and in more rapid succession, while often spanning international boundaries. To date there has not been a trusted vendor environment that allows companies to identify, assess, and mitigate multi-product, global security challenges together on the customers' behalf. ICASI aims to fill this void.

ICASI does not seek to respond to every product security issue that emerges, but rather the consortium is designed to respond to and ideally reduce the potential customer impact of global, multi-vendor cyber threats. The organization is organized around four guiding principles.

·        Customer security-Through ICASI's collaboration and leadership, IT vendors will be better able to identify and resolve multi-vendor security threats

·        Agility and effectiveness-ICASI is committed to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of multi-vendor threat resolution and security response practices.

·        Collaboration and trust--ICASI creates a unique environment where information, necessary to quickly solve security-related threats, can be shared, as appropriate.

·        Leadership and innovation-ICASI includes leading IT companies from around the world and leverages their expertise to innovate security response excellence, which it shares with the industry.

ICASI's commitment to advance Internet security includes changing how vendors work together on multi-product security fixes. Developing and sharing innovations for preventing and mitigating security challenges is also a core focus for ICASI members.

As cyber security challenges change, ICASI members seek to work with other leading firms that have a sustained commitment to advancing security response and engineering excellence to mitigate multi-product, international security incidents. For more information, visit http://www.icasi.org/.