The participating companies in the Anti-Fraud Alliance include Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC), the global leader in information security; Corillian Corp. (Nasdaq: CORI), the top provider of online banking solutions to leading financial institutions; NameProtect, a leading Internet monitoring and digital brand protection company; PassMark Security, a leading online authentication company; and Internet Identity, a leading anti-phishing and defense services firm. These solution providers represent a broad spectrum of security services and solutions, including online security services, proactive fraud and phishing detection, domain and site investigations, multi-factor authentication, desktop security services and site deactivation services.

The mission of the Anti-Fraud Alliance (AFA) is to proactively reduce the incidents of online fraud and identity theft, while increasing user confidence and trust in the Internet. The Anti-Fraud Alliance will provide e-commerce and financial services companies with a suite of services and solutions dedicated to the reduction and prevention of phishing, identity theft and other online fraudulent activities. The prevention, detection, investigation and response services provided by the Anti-Fraud Alliance members have been integrated into a seamless end-to-end solution.

"Because phishing is such a complex and insidious problem, financial institutions need a combination of back-end and front-end technical solutions to address the multiple aspects of the phishing issue. It is helpful for vendors to work together to offer banks and other service providers integrated solutions," said Avivah Litan, Gartner Research vice president and research director.

"The AFA's combined strengths take the guesswork and complexity out of creating a complete counter-phishing program for companies," said Kim Legelis, director of Symantec Industry Solutions. "This first-of-its-kind alliance will help to protect the brand equity of some of the world's leading financial services and e-commerce companies whose brand names are being hijacked for the purpose of committing identity theft and fraud."

"With an average of more than 1,000 new phishing attacks happening each month across the Internet, there is a need for solution providers to join together to fight the increasing threat of phishing, online fraud and identity theft," said Jim Maloney, chief security executive for Corillian. "This alliance joins together a group of industry-leading security providers and thought leaders that can truly provide companies with an end-to-end network of measures to help reduce the attacks on consumers' identities and financial assets. This alliance comes at the right time for the e-commerce and financial services industry."

All alliance members are also participants within the Financial Services Technology Consortium's (FSTC) counter-phishing project that was announced in September, which focuses on defining technical and operating requirements of financial institutions for counter-phishing measures.

"We are delighted that members of our counter-phishing initiative have decided to work together to offer their industry a comprehensive anti-fraud solution," said Zachary Tumin, executive director of the FSTC. "Through our collaborative efforts to map solutions to the phishing-attack taxonomy we developed, it became clear that many vendor offerings were complementary and participation in our initiative provided a forum for information exchange and ultimately a working solution."