With the recent revelation that the UK leads the world in compromised PC systems, some of the world's biggest names in telecoms have combined under the banner of The Fingerprint Alliance to try and combat the growing threat of organised denial of service attacks (DDoS).

Companies such as BT, Cisco, Energis, Earthlink and Rackspace, is joining together with Arbor Networks to share information about attacks via the company's Peakflow SP technology.

Peakflow SP can detect anomalies in the system, for example repeated page requests from a group of machines. Through its 'fingerprinting' features Arbor claims that it can provide a profile to identify new and known network threats. This information can then be passed to network operators and ISP's to allow them to take any needed actions to stop the attack.

Often organised gangs will threaten sites with DDoS attacks demand huge blackmail payments.