Mutating software could predict hacker attacks

Software could predict hacker attacks

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 is 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 centrally,
then remotely update the intrusion-detection software protecting PCs
and networks around the world. This would allow them to recognise
attack patterns before hackers have even developed them.

The first version of the system is geared to predict hacking - though
the technique is equally applicable to viruses. It works by mutating
the short programs or "scripts" that hackers use to invade computers
or which they plant on them for later activation.

The result is artificially created hacking routines that security
systems could be taught to recognise, allowing them to defend networks
against previously unseen attacks.

Self destruct

Most attacks target well-known bugs in commercial web server software.
By sending packets of data designed to exploit these flaws, an
attacker can gain remote control over a computer or force it to do
something self-destructive, like crashing after a certain number of
keystrokes.

To defend against such attacks, today's computer networks use software
that analyses traffic for signs of malicious activity. For instance,
the arrival of data packets at an unusual input port may be a sign
that a hacker is trying to flood a section of memory with oversized
files in order to overwrite working memory and corrupt data.

But the attack may be modified in some way to confuse such defences -
perhaps by combining a number of different attack routines. What is
needed is an intrusion detector that can predict hackers' future
strategies. And that is what Icosystem claims to have developed.

Its attack prediction system takes known hacking software and
systematically mutates it to find the most deadly permutations. The
mutations are kept simple so that the code still runs - there is no
point in random mutations that render the software useless.