A Community for Coordinated and Swift Attack Resolution
Today's large-scale cyber attacks can spread quickly across company boundaries, continents and oceans. In order to stem these attacks, service providers need to work together to identify compromised systems as close to the absolute Internet ingress as possible and share real-time threat intelligence.
That's why Arbor created the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance. The first global coalition of its kind, the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance enables service providers to automatically share attack profiles (known as "fingerprints") in order to stop globally dispersed attacks faster and closer to the source.
How It Works
Arbor's fingerprint sharing capability is integrated into Peakflow SP, which collects and analyzes data from devices around the service provider network to detect abnormal deviations in network traffic and operations. Deviations are then flagged and assessed to determine if they are malicious attacks.
If an attack is identified, Peakflow SP generates an attack fingerprint that is automatically and securely shared with the service provider’s select peers (as identified by the network administrator). Recipients can either accept or reject the fingerprint sharing request and do not need to have an adjacent network to receive the fingerprint. Once the fingerprint has been accepted, the recipient can use the fingerprint information to trace back, analyze and mitigate the attack, thereby identifying and removing compromised hosts as close to the attack entry points as possible.
Who Is Involved?
Some of the largest service providers in the world participate in Arbor's Fingerprint Sharing Alliance, including:
- Asia Netcom
- British Telecom
- Broadwing (now part of Level 3 Communications)
- Cable & Wireless
- Cisco Systems
- Deltacom
- Energis (now part of Cable & Wireless)
- EarthLink
- Internet2
- Liberty Lake Internet Exchange
- Verizon
- Merit Network
- NTT Communications
- University of Pennsylvania
- The Planet (now merged with Softlayer)
- Rackspace Managed Hosting
- Switch Communications Group
- Utah Educational Networks
- Verizon Dominicana
- Wiltel (now part of Level 3 Communications)
- XO Communications
- XS4ALL