Piscataway, N.J. — The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) has formally launched its new Industry Connections program, designed to help companies collaborate in the early stages of technical design. The program allows groups to leverage IEEE and IEEE-SA resources in a customized format and produce content such as proposals for standards, white papers, specialized tools, online databases, data feeds and/or video.
IEEE-SA says Industry Connections addresses the earliest stages of the standards-development lifecycle and can serve as an incubator for new IEEE standards-related activities. Groups benefit from a protected collaboration environment with minimal effort and expense, says IEEE-SA, enabling them to concentrate on their core purpose, which include building an industry understanding and consensus in new technical areas, developing roadmaps for the creation and usage of consensus documents, assessing the need for standardization, and making decisions on the most appropriate form and venue.
The program also announced its first activity, the Industry Connections Security Group (ICSG) that will pool expertise in enhancing computer security. Initial members are AVG Technologies, McAfee Inc., Microsoft Corp., Sophos, Symantec Corp. and Trend Micro.
“Industry Connections has provided the ICSG the ideal avenue into efficient collaboration around computer security,” said Jeff Green, ICSG chair and senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs, in a statement. “Instead of concentrating on the necessary but tedious details around forming a group, we have been able to dive in to our primary, shared objective of combating the systematic and rapid rise in computer security threats.”
ICSG’s first working group is focused on malware such as viruses, worms and spyware. Threats have increased dramatically from 125,000 unique pieces of malware in 2006 to 1.5 million in 2008 and 1.2 million in the first half of 2009 alone, according to McAfee.
ICSG says it is working to establish more intelligent ways of sharing malware samples and the information associated with them in a way that makes the security industry more effective.