Penn State Stops the Worm's Wiggle

February 2007

Penn State researchers develop new worm_stopping technology

Researchers at Penn State University say they have developed anti_malware technology that can identify and contain worms in milliseconds rather than minutes __ greatly limiting how far they spread and how much damage they cause. The new technology focuses on analyzing packet rate and frequency of connections, rather than signature or pattern identification, according to a release from Penn State. "A lot of worms need to spread quickly in order to do the most damage, so our software looks for anomalies in the rate and diversity of connection requests going out of hosts," said Peng Liu, associate professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State and lead researcher on the system. Penn State researchers assert that because many security technologies focus on signature or pattern identification for blocking worms, they cannot respond to new attacks fast enough, allowing worms to exploit network vulnerabilities.
Source: http://www.informationweek.com/