Scientists Mull "Biological" Methods to Battle Malware

Biology Methods to Help Fight Hackers

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 09/27/2006 | 12:00 AM ]

The Web is crawling with different types of harmful software or as it best known – malware. Both viruses and worms are different forms of malware, software applications designed to to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent.

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The biological terms used to name and describe the malware has all the right to be there. Virus in you computer follows virtually the same path that a normal virus does in an infected human body. But the similarities do not stop here: an article by Popular Science web-site describe how ideas from biology - evolution, immune systems and forensics - will keep your PC safe from hackers and harmful software.

“If we want to fight back, we need a new approach, something that fundamentally changes the way computers interact with the Internet and how the Internet functions. The approach is to make the Internet function like a biological entity that wards off attacks the way a healthy body fights off a cold - in other words, to build a network with an immune system,” writes the author.

“Unless we move toward that goal, we’ll just spend all our time solving new problems. You can’t build something that’s perfectly secure, so you make something that can survive the attacks you can anticipate, making it harder and more expensive for criminals to do their thing. Even Fort Knox could be taken, but it would require a small army to do it, which would cut heavily into the bad guys’ profits.” says Pradeep Khosla, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s college of engineering and co-director of CyLab.

• Popular Science: The Internet is Sick... But We Can Make it Better.