INTERNET: Three firms have joined forces to create a non-profit organisation in Dublin to research and monitor the behaviour and motives of hackers, and share this information with the computer community.

The Irish "honeynet" project will mimic a US honeynet project established in April 1999 by Mr Lance Spitzner, a senior architect at Sun Microsystems.

Mr Spitzner, who introduced the Irish project at a security conference in Dublin yesterday, said honeynets worked to raise the awareness of threats and vulnerabilities that existed on the internet.

A honeynet is an entire computer network, wired with sensors and connected to the internet.

As hackers approach the network, their activities are monitored, from attacks to break-ins.

Deloitte & Touche, Espion Limited and the US data centre group Inflow have all joined the Honeynet Research Alliance in the Republic.

This alliance will set up a honeynet, manage the system and collect analysis of illegal hacker activities here.

The resulting research will be used to develop more accurate and effective security systems for business in the Republic.

Espion, a recently founded intrusion protection firm that will help analyse the information, released the results of a 48-hour pilot study of just one server this week.

This showed there were five automated worm attacks, three automated vulnerability and pre-attack scans, and five manual attempts to access the server.

There was also one denial of service attack set up from a server in Malaysia.

"When we got started in 1999 in the US it was really a couple of geeks getting together and trying to figure out how bad guys operate," said Mr Spitzner.

"Now we have lots of skills within the group, which is capped at 30 people."

The FBI and other US government organisations have recently sought the advice of the US Honeynet Project to build profiles of hackers and find out the best methods of capturing information.

"I really think it is helping to raise awareness of security issues," said Mr Spitzner.

"It also shows that the scanning of IP addresses has doubled every year as \ tools get better and more automated."

As US laws get tougher on hackers and US companies get better security systems in place, Europe will become the focus for more hacking activity, according to several speakers at the introduction of the project. According to Mr Spitzner, Europeans have not invested enough in security.