Five online security software and service providers have formed the Anti-Fraud Alliance to help e-commerce and financial services firms fight online fraudulent activities such as phishing and identity theft.

"The reason the alliance was formed is very simple: Online fraud is accelerating substantially, particularly with ... respect to phishing," said Kim Legelis, director of industry solutions at Symantec Corp., one of the alliance"s founding companies. "It"s widely recognized by those who are involved in the problem ... that there is not a single solution or single vendor that"s able to mitigate the multiple aspects of a phishing attack, such as the planning stages, the setup of fraudulent Web sites, the actual attack itself, often delivered by e-mail, the collection of information and the use of stolen credentials for the purpose of fraud.

"So the five firms have formed an alliance to address these issues."

Legelis said the Anti-Fraud Alliance can help financial institutions, in particular, understand the breadth of online scams and work to find simple solutions. That way, institutions don"t have to figure out which vendors address which pieces of the problem.

"We"re trying to accelerate financial institutions" ability to solve the phishing problem by bringing to them a more complete set of capabilities for negating their risk and for protecting their customers," Legelis said.

The participating companies are:

- Symantec in Cupertino, Calif., which has an online fraud management system that detects e-mail attacks and then blocks those attacks;

- Corillian Corp. in Portland, Ore., a provider of online banking systems. The Corillian Anti-Fraud Detection System helps financial institutions and e-commerce companies identify phishing and other fraudulent online activities before they become full-fledged attacks;

- Name Protect Inc. in Madison, Wis., a digital brand protection company that provides fraud detection;

- PassMark Security Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., which has developed an authentication system that combats fraud; and

- Internet Identity in Tacoma, Wash., which helps get rogue and spoofed Web sites deactivated.