Arbor Networks spearheads telecom alliance to block attacks

British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, MCI, and NTT Communications are participating in the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance, which allows companies to share attack profiles and quickly stop internet attacks "as far from the target area as possible," said Tom Schuster, president of Arbor Networks.

Arbor has added the ability to share real-time attack fingerprints across network boundaries to its Peakflow platform, an architecture for collecting data across a nework to detect anomalyies and mitigating threats.

Previously, service providers had a manual process for sharing attack information, which was time-consuming and could wind up revealing competitive information, Schuster said. Peakflow's attack fingerprint sharing capability speeds the information-sharing process and tailors data to the recipient to prevent inadvertent disclosure of confidential information, he said.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks have become bigger, more frequent, and more sophisticated, making cooperation between service providers essential, Arbor executives said.

"Cyberattacks are increasingly distributed, often spanning the entire internet and lots of providers," said Farnum Jahanian, founder and board chairman at Arbor. "Cooperation between different service providers is critical to tracing and stopping these attacks in real time."

Others participating in the alliance include EarthLink, WilTel Communications, Asia Netcom, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cisco Systems.

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