Telcos, Internet Service Providers, equipment makers, universities and hosting companies are joining forces to exchange information about attempted hack attacks. The "Fingerprint Sharing Alliance" doesn't actually share fingerprints but rather profiles of attacks.

Arbor Networks will collect the information automatically. For instance: a denial of service attack is launched against a customer of yours. Arbor will detect the spike in traffic, check it's not event-based, and give you information to defend against the attack.

It will also collect enough information, a fingerprint, to identify the attack and pass that information to downstream service providers hit by the attack.

Traditionally this kind of information was shared informally between companies based on personal contacts among security staff.

There are some big names backing the network including BT, Cisco, Earthlink, Internet2, MCI, The Planet, University of Pennslyvania and Rackspace Managed Hosting.

More info here.®

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