Cyber attacks are quickly becoming a very serious threat to internet users all over the world. Every day we are hearing more and more about big businesses and government websites that are getting hacked by different groups and causing mayhem for everyone involved. The bigger problem is, however, that it is extremely hard to completely wipe out this type of threat.
Even though it may seem impossible to completely obliterate cyber attacks for good, Japanese scientists may have figured out a solution that doesn’t just protect you from getting attacked at that moment, but forever. Computer scientists from Japan have reported that they have successfully developed a computer virus that can be launched on the internet that would track down and disable the source of a cyber attack.
As with every new claim in the science and technology world, a lot of experts are remaining skeptical, mainly due to the fact that if this were to actually be true, it would solve probably the biggest problems to online security ever faced, known in the cyber security world as the source attribution problem.
Hackers are able to launch harmful viruses or DoS attacks by using a bunch of layers of a proxy server or by using a botnet to disguise their source internet address. This masks the actual origination of the attack itself, making finding the source nearly impossible. The company claiming to have solved this problem, Fujitsu, has claimed that it has solved the source attribution problem and has also discovered how to destroy any attacking code it meets on its way to the source.
This “friendly” virus has already passed a plethora of tests in closed networks where it bounced between attacking computers, reached the origin of the attack and sent the ID information back to its controllers. However, this technology is not without its skeptics, like Director of Security Research at Trend Micro Rik Ferguson.
Ferguson relayed his skepticism in a statement saying, “It is not a simple matter to ‘break into’ a computer that is found to be part of a chain attack. If it were possible to backtrack through every stage of the attack chain and examine data then this task would be made significantly more simple, but that is and remains a major challenge ethically, legally and technologically.”
Another possible problem with this type of technology, that was warned against by security firm Imperva, is that a virus like this one, that follows the attack back to the source, could be disastrous in the fact that it could go after the wrong people. Hackers could very well figure out a way to make the attack appear as if it came from somewhere it did not, letting the wrong person pay the price for something they didn’t do.
Source: Sci-Tech Today – Computer Virus Could Disable Cyberattack Source
