CTI: Computer telephony integration. Integrating computers with telephone and switch systems to make, receive, and manage telephone calls.

H.323: The Internet is a packet network; H.323 is the specification that defines packet standards for terminals, equipment, and services for multimedia communications over packet networks.

IP telephony: Using the Internet to send, receive, or manage voice messages or real-time voice conversations.

ISDN: Integrated services digital network. A standard for telephone line data transmission.

PBX: Private branch exchange. A private telephone switching system located at a customer's site that switches incoming calls to extensions at the site.

T1: A North American standard for digital transmission, also used in Hong Kong and Japan; this high-speed (1.5mbps) phone line can carry 24 simultaneous analog phone calls for a fraction of the cost of 24 single-channel lines.

TAPI: Telephony application programming interface. A standard developed in 1993 by Microsoft and Intel. Basic TAPI calls include line configuration, device status, and call initiation and termination; TAPI 2.0 adds support for media stream routing and control, tone monitoring, and standard switch functions such as call transfers and multiline conferencing.

TSAPI: Telephone services API. An alternative to TAPI that was jointly developed by Novell and AT&T. TSAPI was designed from the ground up for a client-server environment, with separate interfaces for the client, PC PBX server, and NetWare server.

Unified messaging: Convergence of voice, e-mail, and fax into a central repository.

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Eight Internet providers have teamed with Internet security firm ICSA.net in an alliance to prevent denial-of-service attacks like the ones that downed several major Web sites earlier this month.

The nine founding members of the Alliance for Internet Security promise to adopt security measures that will not only make it difficult to attack their computers but, more importantly, prevent their systems from being used in an attack against others.

"The members of the Alliance are coming forward to be part of the solution and demonstrate their commitment to the right thing on behalf of all of the Internet," said Peter Tippett, AIS chairman, in a statement.

"The first step for each of us is to clean up our own backyards, ensuring that our systems cannot be used as attack agents."

Starting Feb. 7 with Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), a series of attacks slowed or, in many cases, downed major Web sites when a deluge of meaningless data and spurious access requests were targeted at their servers by unknown attackers.

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By week's end, eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY), E*Trade (Nasdaq: EGRP), Buy.com (Nasdaq: BUYX), ZDNet (NYSE: ZDZ), CNN, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), The Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Network and Excite joined Yahoo! as victims of what are known as distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Lessons to be learned The lesson for Internet service providers? Individuals and businesses on the Internet must not only protect their own computers from attack but also make sure the systems aren't being used to attack others.

'The first step for each of us is to clean up our own backyards, ensuring that our systems cannot be used as attack agents.'|Peter Tippett, AIS chairman Each member company must pledge to secure its own internal systems, add filtering technology to prevent "spoofing" or forging the source address of a piece of data, and provide support for others to do the same.

Founding members include Cable One, Cable & Wireless, Digex, Global Crossing and its U.S. subsidiary Global Center, GTE Internetworking, Level(3), Road Runner, and Sprint.

"All Internet users should assure that their own network is in order and that their ISP is doing the appropriate filtering on behalf of everyone," said Harris Schwartz, director of security for Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) high-speed Internet provider, Road Runner.

Broadband providers offering individuals and small businesses fast connections are quickly becoming a stomping ground for Web vandals looking for easy targets.

Most customers security-challenged Most users of such services know little of how to secure their systems -- and as many as 10 percent of such systems are completely open to anyone on the network.

Educating such users about their role in making the Internet secure should be a top priority, said Stephen E. Cross, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, speaking Wednesday before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.

"Support programs that provide early training in security practices and appropriate use ... should be integrated into general education about computing," Cross said.

Yet, for the most part, the AIS will continue to overlook users and instead focus on businesses.

Users on their own "This is about companies that are Internet-connected companies," said Laurie Wagner, senior vice president of business development for ICSA.net.

Wagner pointed out that the alliance first needs to concentrate on the 5,000 or so small Internet providers that may not know much about security.

For now, users are on their own, she said. "ISPs are not being paid to be security consultants for their users."

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