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Stopping Malware Before It Hits

Posted by timothy on from the every-bit-helps dept.

SpudGunMan writes "John Lockwood, Ph.D, an assistant professor of computer science at Washington University, and the graduate students that work in his research laboratory, have developed a hardware platform called the Field-programmable Port Extender (FPX) that scans for malware transmitted over a network and filters out unwanted data."

1 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. advantages by BubbleNOP · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Some advantages I can think of:
    1. Speed. Servers often are already too loaded to run more apps that check for signatures.
    2. A hardware device is usually harder to hack than the software platform doing checking. A clever piece of malware can compromise the checking machine itself.
    3. If checking is done by a secondary machine, by the time it detects the malware the infected machine may be significantly damaged already. A hardware device placed between the network and the machine, on the other hand, can stop things early enough.