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Researchers Tout New Network Worm Weapon
coondoggie writes "Can Internet worms be thwarted within minutes of their infection? Researchers at Ohio State University believe they can. The key, researchers found, is for software to monitor the number of scans that machines on a network send out. When a machine starts sending out too many scans — a sign that it has been infected — administrators should take it off line and check it for viruses. In a nutshell, the researchers developed a model that calculated the probability that a virus would spread, depending on the maximum number of scans allowed before a machine was taken off line.'The difficulty was figuring out how many scans were too many,' researchers said."
They were looking at 10,000 scans, which would be about how much I would expect my constantly-on bittorrent to do over the course of a week or more. I don't think it'll be a problem at that threshold.
At lower thresholds (which they'll surely need since worms and viruses will just start scanning more slowly), they can start analyzing patterns and individual packets. This won't solve the problem overnight, but it will eliminate virtually all worms and viruses in the wild right now and make future worms and viruses propagate much more slowly.