In the latest expansion of its burgeoning cloud arsenal, IBM has launched a new service that provides detailed information on malicious activity from around the world  for free with the goal of fostering more effective coordination against hackers. The industry has been sorely lacking such collaboration thus far.

Although there is an abundance of threat intelligence sharing platforms out there ranging from commercial services to government-run networks, organizations struggle to make sense of it all. A full 85 percent of the security professionals that the Ponemon Institute surveyed for a recent study expressed mistrust in the quality of external security information, confidence that drops even further when it comes to free sources.

IBM’s new X-Force Exchange, so-named after the internal taskforce charged with tracking the movements of hackers, aims to remedy the situation. The platform taps the company’s thousands of enterprise customers for daily information on over 15 billion security events across some 270 million end-points made accessible through its web-based interface in near real-time.

That data is piled on top of the more than 700 terabytes of information that IBM has already collected up to this point, which makes the service one of if not the biggest of its kind. Collaboration functionality built directly into X-Force Exchange allows security professionals to validate the incoming information with third parties and run analyses to uncover attack patterns.

Organizations will eventually also have the ability to perform that kind of work automatically through the planned addition of support for the emerging STIX and TAXII standards, which define a common format in which to communicate threat intelligence to applications. That’s presumably how IBM plans to eventually monetize the service – by offering integrated automation tools to act on the data from its platform – but there is one major obstacle standing in the way.

Facebook Inc. The social networking giant caught the industry off guard earlier this year with the introduction of its own free intelligence sharing service that aims to fill the same role as X-Force Exchange, allowing security professionals to quickly communicate threats with their peers. The platform already provides a standard collaboration format and even goes a step further than that, automatically harmonizing data of different types upon submission.

And so hackers have apparently managed to pit IBM versus Facebook in one of the most unusual rivalries that the industry has seen yet. But that’s ultimately good news for the organizations who will end up using their data, which have gained not one but two new free threat intelligence sources in a matter of just a few months.