Getting companies to share information about hacker-attack techniques and security breaches has proven to be a tough battle. Most companies simply don't want to share sensitive information about attacks against their systems with either law enforcement or security information sharing consortiums, known as information and analysis centers.

This week, the federally funded CERT Coordination Center and security event management application maker ArcSight Inc. say they're going to team with three universities in an attempt to jump-start a project that will create real-time data sharing and analysis across organizations.

If successful, both ArcSight and CERT hope the joint venture, dubbed the Cyber Security Information Sharing Project, will provide a model for other data-sharing initiatives in both the public and private sectors. The three universities that will be part of the project have yet to be selected, CERT director Rich Pethia says.

ArcSight will donate copies of its security-monitoring software to the project. Each university will collect security-related information from its firewalls and intrusion-detection systems, and security event and incident data will be sent to CERT for analysis.

CERT's Pethia says he hopes the project will provide insight about attacks and other IT security threats.