Dive Brief:

• Eight of the biggest U.S. banks plan to work together to fight cybercrime the financial-services sector faces, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• The banks — which reportedly include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America and Goldman Sachs Group, among others — will form a group that will share security data in hopes of improving cybersecurity for all of them.
• All the members of the new group have not yet been named.

Dive Insight:

A rash of attacks on financial institutions have banks looking for new ways to protect themselves. J.P. Morgan is reportedly planning to spend $600 million on cybersecurity efforts in 2016.

Last November, four people were charged in a hacking plot that targeted several large U.S. financial institutions between 2012 and 2015, including J.P. Morgan and other financial services companies. The hackers allegedly stole the personal information of more than 100 million customers. The U.S. Attorneys Office described the act as the "largest theft of customer data from a US financial institution in history."

Sharing threat intelligence information can go a long way toward preventing other institutions from becoming victims themselves, allowing organizations to respond to a potential security flaws before they are targeted. This is especially true if an enterprise shares the information from a flaw that was already exploited. 

In May, global financial messaging network SWIFT asked its members to share data with each other about cyberattacks in order to improve their ability to protect themselves.

The U.S. government is also trying to get businesses to share threat information, offering incentives through its Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which will hopefully result in tools to all companies to further protect their networks.