Trend Micro has begun offering to police agencies access to its large private database containing valuable intelligence on the online criminal underground.

The database was exclusively available to law enforcement agencies to assist them with discovering the identity of crackers, carders and identity thieves.
Vice president security research Rik Ferguson told SC it has so far supplied law enforcement agencies in Germany with licenses to its custom Maltego transforms -- a series of scripts that run within the popular open source intelligence and forensics toolkit Maltego.
Transforms allowed researchers to visualise and discover linkages between data sets.
"It's not something we are selling -- we're providing licenses only to police agencies," Ferguson said.
The database was populated with reports from Trend Micro researchers located around the world which included criminal advertisements, forum posts, and identity and OPSEC data relating to crackers and carders.