Fingerprint Sharing Alliance making the 'Net safer

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2005Mar/gee20050330029795.htm
posted 10:22am EST Wed Mar 30 2005 - submitted by Joshua
NEWS

Arbor Networks, maker of the Peakflow Platform for network data analysis, has developed a cooperative with telecoms, data/networking companies, and ISPs around the world called the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance. The alliance is designed to let the different companies communicate rapidly and automatically with one another to fight Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and other types of attack. Arbor summarizes it as "A community for coordinated, rapid attack resolution."

Currently, most ISPs analyze their own data and contact other ISPs when needed via telephone or other non-automated means. This process takes precious time, and can result in a DDoS attack having a larger impact on the networks.

The companies that have joined the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance all employ Arbor Networks' Peakflow SP, which analyzes data from each company's network to detect possible issues and allows the different companies to send "fingerprint" data about the issues to one another without revealing secret competitive information. This allows network administrators to address possible issues in real-time, reducing the impact of attacks. Asia Netcom, British Telecom, Cisco Systems, EarthLink, Internet2, MCI, NTT Communications, RackSpace, the University of Pennsylvania, and Verizon Dominicana, among others, have all joined the alliance.For more information, see Arbor Networks and TechNewsWorld.