Some of the world's biggest telecoms companies have banded together to share information about hacking attacks.

The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance uses a custom database to examine the behaviour of attacks against IT systems, or so-called 'fingerprints'.

These are then shared between members to create an early warning system for incidents such as denial-of-service attacks.

"When an attack hits, time is of the essence," said Tom Schuster, president of Arbor Networks, which set up the system.

"By sharing the attack details providers are better able to protect their customers as the attack is mitigated closer to the point of origin, thus preventing collateral damage.

"Our intention is to have global service providers join together to combat these cyber-threats and protect the overall infrastructure of the internet."

The system uses software that monitors the network and identifies 'spikes' indicating abnormal activity. Once the event has been logged and dealt with its behaviour is turned into a fingerprint against which other events can be matched.

All information that could be confidential is blocked before the data is shared. Members announced so far include BT, NTT, MCI and Cisco.

"We are seeing more tech-savvy criminals trying to make money through denial-of-service extortion schemes," said senior Yankee Group analyst Jim Slaby.

"Service providers that are co-operating by sharing attack fingerprints are helping mitigate these threats more quickly and closer to the source, thus making the internet a more secure place."

Several informal arrangements to share attack data have already been formed, usually between friends in the industry, but this is the first official database system. The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance is actively recruiting more members.