Telecommunications giants BT, NTT, MCI and Cisco plus 14 other companies have joined forces to share information about hacking attempts, called "fingerprints," to their systems. The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance hopes that the new system, which uses a central database, may be able to provide early warning about denial of service attacks.

"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," Tom Schuster, president of Arbor Networks said. Arbor is the company that set up the system.

To spot hacking attempts, the system using software that monitors traffic across the network. When there is an unusual spike in traffic, it logs the event, then turns it into a "fingerprint" so it can be shared across the network.

The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance says that all confidential information is stripped from the data for the companies and their users' protection.

The new system should mean faster responses to hacking attempts and fewer disruptions to Internet activity, according to Arbor.

While several groups have been established to share data on malicious activity, this is the first system to actually log attack information into a database. "Our intention is to have global service providers join together to combat these cyber-threats and protect the overall infrastructure of the internet," Schuster said.