New technique cuts time of identifying and capturing a worm from minutes to milliseconds

Penn State University researchers have created technology they say can nab computer worms more quickly than traditional signature-based systems and speedily set free the traffic if it's determined to be harmless after all.

The Proactive Worm Containment technology watches for a packet's rate and diversity of connections to other networks to identify worms, rather than having to wait around for a signature to be generated to spot new malware.

This technique can cut the time from identifying and capturing a worm from minutes to milliseconds, allowing for only a handful of infected packets to spread, the research team claims. That makes a big difference when you consider that notorious worms such as Slammer could issue 4,000 packets a second when attacking Microsoft's SQL Server.