Some of the world’s biggest ISPs, telcos and networking companies have banded together in the “Fingerprint Sharing Alliance” to fight network security threats in an organized fashion. The companies, including Cisco Systems, EarthLink, Asia Netcom, British Telecommunications, and MCI will share detailed profile information on attacks launched against their networks. Information to be shared will include the source of at-tacks, IDG News Service reported. The alliance will make it easier for ISPs and network operators to crack down on global Internet attacks more quickly, according to Tom Schuster, president of Arbor Networks which launched the new alliance. One security said the alliance formalizes and strengthens the information activities of security experts at many of the leading companies had been sharing. “It’s clearly a good thing to look at bringing automation and the network effect to a process already in place among some of the big carriers,” said Jim Slaby, a senior analyst for security solutions and services at the Yankee Group. “I think the security guys at the big ISPs informally talk to each other about security threats,” Slaby said. “This is bringing communication of new threats among all participants instead of ad hoc communication that goes on over the phone mostly. Suddenly you have most of the major carriers and ISPs in the world participating is a great step forward in preventing these attacks.” The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance uses technology from Arbor called Peakflow to spot network attacks and automatically generate a profile, or “fingerprint” of the attack in a standard data file format called PCAP, the news service said. That fingerprint information is passed along to other service providers closer to the source of the attack, which can then block the source of the traffic, he said. Arbor wrapped features that support the Fingerprint Alliance into the last re-lease of Peakflow, which came out at the beginning of 2005. Alliance members have been using Peakflow to share attack fingerprints since then, Schuster said. The alliance replaces an ad hoc system of e-mail messages and phone calls that operators of large networks use to coordinate their response to attacks and threats, Arbor said. Because communication has been cumbersome, ISPs, and net-work owners have had no incentive to share attack information. The alliance will make it easier for them to cooperate, which will also lower the threshold that attacks must pass to get the attention of ISPs, so that even attacks on small ISP customers prompt response from large infrastructure providers. Peakflow also scrubs the data in fingerprints, so alliance members cannot use them to sniff sensitive information on competitors, according to Schuster. Technology Industry