New anti-worm technology invented

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.

Penn State researchers assert that because many security technologies focus on signature or pattern identification for blocking worms, they cannot respond to new attacks fast enough, allowing worms to exploit network vulnerabilities. Several minutes can elapse between when a signature-based system first recognizes a new worm and when it creates a new signature to block it from spreading any more.