Smart agents could one day roam computer networks hunting down viruses, says
IBM. Today鈥檚 antivirus software can only detect known viruses, so new ones can
be very dangerous. But IBM鈥檚 agents, which it is developing with the University
of Southampton, are based on neural network software that can be 鈥渢rained鈥 to
profile the normal behaviour of a computer network by monitoring how often files
are updated, what sort of changes are made, how big the files are, and so on.
This profile is used by the agent to define 鈥渘ormal鈥 computer behaviour, and it
alerts the system administrator if there are any departures from this.
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