The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance has been assembled in order to keep tabs on the hackers of the world, and the threats that they pose. Some of the world's biggest telecoms companies have joined, with the aim of sharing information about hacking. The Alliance will use a custom database to examine the behaviour of attacks against IT systems, or so-called 'fingerprints'. This will then be shared between members to create an early warning system for hack attacks such as denial of service attacks and so forth.

"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." - Tom Schuster, president of Arbor Networks.