Los Angeles wants businesses to team up to fight cyber crime

Los Angeles wants to join forces with businesses to fight cyber crime.

It announced the first collective regional cybersecurity defense effort in the United States on Tuesday, called the Los Angeles Cyber Lab.

The goal is to disseminate knowledge gained from analyzing "one billion security-related events and over four million attempted intrusions into city networks per day" to businesses across the city, according to a press release put out by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

"The lab will alert small and medium-sized business partners to attacks as they occur, and larger businesses can receive automated updates to their own cyber defense systems," wrote the authors of the press release. "Over time, the platform will evolve into a mutual exchange of threat information with private sector partners, further fortifying L.A.’s capacity to thwart cyber criminals."

Joining the initiative is free.

Businesses and government officials hope to share data on attacks they witness so that others can more readily identify what's coming and how to stop it. The plan is to talk via email and data sharing so businesses know how to identify a threat, what red flags look out for in their own digital architecture, and how to fix problems once they become an issue.

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Much of the online world is now on the lookout for suspicious emails, but it always helps to know the subject line of those emails before they reach your inbox. The lab's first advisory board companies include Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Motorola, Microsoft, and many others.

In the not-so-distant future, the cyber lab hopes to start an incubator to test out new "cyber defense strategies."