Authored by Stefan Walter, Front-End Developer, IBM Security.

We’ve talked before about coping with scrap paper overload, and it would seem to follow that overwhelming email inboxes might also impede the consumption of information about threats to your organization. But what if you could make email work for you instead of against you when gathering threat intelligence to aid security investigations?

Turn Inbox Overload Into Threat Intelligence

The IBM X-Force Exchange includes an email inbox feature. Sometimes an email you have would be the perfect kick-start for a new collection, such as a summary a colleague sent you or a suspicious email you received. In cases like this, it’s easy to forward this email directly to the X-Force Exchange platform. With this capability, you will have all the relevant data from related report feeds automatically generated in a new collection. You can then continue to work and collaborate on the X-Force Exchange platform.

There are three different places where you can use the email inbox feature:

• Per user: Emails sent to this inbox generate a new private collection for you, the user.
• Per group: Here, emails will create a new shared collection for the group, which can be either public or private, based on the group access settings.
• Per collection: Emails sent to this inbox will be added to an existing collection.

Once the email is sent, the subject of the sent email becomes the name of the collection. All found observables are attached as threat intelligence reports. The body of the email will be the collection content with basic HTML markup preserved.

X-Force Exchange in Action

To access the user inbox, go to settings by clicking on your user icon in the top right, then go to the inbox page and click the checkbox. A new email address is generated and active immediately. From now on, any emails sent to this email will create a new private collection for your X-Force Exchange account.

For the group inbox, go the corresponding group page, click on the settings page and enable the inbox workflow by clicking the checkbox. Now you can instantly collaborate on threat intelligence with your predefined groups, whether public or private.

The collection inbox is enabled in the sharing options dialog of the collection. Go to the Inbox tab and enable the inbox for this collection to continue to add valuable threat intelligence to your ongoing investigation workflow.

Learn more in this short animation, or visit the X-Force Exchange yourself to try it out!

Learn More About IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence