Facebook is launching a social network for cyber security professionals to share information about threats that could lead to cyber attacks.

The world’s largest social network is stepping up its work in cyber security by teaming with other technology companies including Yahoo and online scrapbooking site Pinterest. The platform will enable companies to share clues about how hackers are behaving in the hope of preventing security breaches.

Mark Hammel, Facebook's manager of threat infrastructure, said ThreatExchange was developed from a system the company was already using internally to make it easier to catalogue threats to the site in real time.

He said Facebook could use the software that supported the network to “power” the threat detection database. It would give the service away for free, unlike some other threat detection systems. He said the initial partners made sense for Facebook because they faced similar threats and had sizeable user bases.

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015)