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, Proactive Worm Containment, 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," says Peng Liu, associate professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State and lead researcher on the Proactive Worm Containment system.