New system kills worm outbreaks
US researchers have come up with a technique that claims to be able to stop Internet worms within milliseconds of an outbreak. The Proactive Worm Containment (PWC) system, as its inventors at Penn State University call it, uses no signatures to identify an attack. Instead it relies on the frequency of connections at a packet level, and analyses the number of connections this traffic is making to other networks.
This is said to counter one of the biggest issues in worm defence, namely that they spread at incredible speed before they can be stopped. By the time security systems have recovered, the damage is often done.
