Several Internet service providers and technology organizations have teamed up to swap network attack profiles in a bid to help fight off concerted online network attacks, the groups calling themselves the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance announced March 28.
The new body believes lost revenue and repair costs from network attacks this year could hit $17.5 billion, up from $13.2 billion in 2003, as an analysis from Computer Economics Inc. has suggested.
The Alliance includes ISPs/telecoms and tech groups like Asia Netcom, British Telecom, Broadwing, Cisco Systems, EarthLink, Internet2, ITC^DeltaCom, MCI, Nerit Network, The Planet, the University of Pennsylvania, the Utah Educational Network, and Rackspace.
"The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance provides both automation and flexibility in communicating attack information and profiles with upstream providers," said Asia Netcom senior vice president/chief technology officer Wilfred Kwan, announcing the new group. "Not only does this yield more reliable service for our customers, but it also helps us to contribute to the overall integrity and safety of the Internet by quickly communicating with other providers."
"Providers like BT spend a lot of time and resources protecting the integrity and availability of their networks to deliver the services our customers expect of us," said British Telecom head of network security Dave Harcourt, at the announcement of the group’s mission.
"The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance is a great complement to this because it enables providers to quickly share information on attacks across global networks,” he continued. “This is very empowering to any service provider because it facilitates a community for providers to get at the source of attack traffic and minimize the impact it has on everyone's networks and services."
EarthLink networking engineer and operations director Greg Collins said the Alliance would help bring its subscribers a more ideal online experience by eliminating more online threats and nuisances, while Internet2 director of network initiatives Steve Corbato said efforts like the collaborative Alliance were the only way to achieve a more secure and robust Internet.
“We believe the Alliance can help enable a new level of awareness across traditional provider boundaries and that the highly collaborative nature of Internet2's advanced networking community is conducive to demonstrating these new capabilities," Corbato said.
Experts at the University of Pennsylvania agreed.
"Sharing the right information quickly and efficiently among the networks affected can be the key to dealing with a large network-based attack,” said senior technology director Deke Kassabian.
“The University of Pennsylvania is very interested in the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance as a way to streamline this process, efficiently sharing details among network operations personnel who can act on them,” he continued. “By working together within the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance, we have the opportunity to limit or stop more network-based attacks early on, before they can become major problems."
