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Technology

How to second-guess the next hack attack

By Will Knight

24 January 2004

NOVEL computer viruses and worms can sweep the world within hours, leaving a trail of devastation, because firewalls and antiviral software work by identifying the telltale signatures of known attacks. They are useless against anything completely new.

But now software engineers at Icosystem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have developed a program that can predict what’s coming next by “evolving” future hacker and virus attacks based on information from known ones. The company is testing the technique with the help of the US Army’s Computer Crimes Investigation Command in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

The idea would be to generate these novel attack strategies…

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