A number of industry giants have joined forces to form the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance, a global initiative to help network operators quickly and automatically respond to global infrastructure attacks.

Rob Pollard, vice-president for Europe at founder member Arbor Networks, said, "These attacks are coming in on many different interfaces [of an ISP's networks] and manually identifying these is a big problem. [This initiative means] I can sort out my local customers and then share the attack fingerprint with network providers worldwide."

Other members of the alliance include BT, MCI, NTT, Asia Netcom, Cisco Systems, Earthlink, and UK company Energis.

Current Analysis analyst Sandra O'Boyle said, "This is a step in the right direction to protect public networks; and enterprise customers will welcome the co-operation from network operators."

Pollard added that as well as sharing fingerprints of attacks, the system allows contact details to be exchanged so ISP network administrators can contact each other directly on a one-to-one basis, speeding up a process that previously involved communication via user forums, for example.

One major benefit is that service providers and their customers should now spend less time dealing with attacks. Another benefit is that the attacks should be mitigated closer to the ingress points. The improvements may also lead to enhanced service level agreements (SLAs) between ISPs and their customers.

The alliance will use Arbor's Peakflow SP system to alert members when attacks occur. Peakflow SP is an enhanced version of software already used by leading service providers worldwide to share attack fingerprints automatically across network boundaries, without revealing competitive information.

Peakflow provides real-time network views, enabling organisations to protect against worms, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and insider misuse, as well as traffic and routing instabilities.

"Network security is a top concern and with IP telephony growth it will become even more critical. There should be more shared security initiatives of this type," said O'Boyle of Current Analysis.