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November 09, 2007, 04:00 PM ET
A Computer Scientist Battles Botnets
Computer-security analysts have long since learned to hate “botnets”: clusters of computers, infected with worms or Trojan-horse programs, that are taken over by outside users. After all, botnets can do plenty of awful things: They trawl for passwords and credit-card numbers, fire off spam, and propagate automatically.
But now Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says he may soon be able to stop botnets in their tracks. Mr. Barford’s company, Nemean Networks, is developing software that can identify 99.9 percent of “malicious signatures” associated with botnet attacks, according to Roland Piquepaille of ZDNet.
That success rate isn’t revolutionary, in and of itself: Other botnet-detection tools can root out well over 99 percent of the attacks. What separates Mr. Barford’s tool is a lack of “false positives.” Since many botnet attacks are well-disguised, many security tools compensate by marking plenty of perfectly benign transactions as malicious signatures. But the professor’s technology all but eliminates those false reports. —Brock Read
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