Auto-Immune: "Symbiotes" Could Be Deployed to Thwart Cyber Attacks
Anti-hacker defenses have long focused mainly on protecting personal computers and servers in homes and offices. However, as microchips grow smaller and more powerful, new targets for hackers are becoming widespread--embedded computers such as the electronics handling car engines, brakes and door locks ; the routers that form the Internet's backbone; the machines running power plants , rail lines and prison cell doors ; and even implantable medical devices such as defibrillators and insulin pumps . Many of these embedded devices can now link with other computers, putting them equally at risk to intruders. Indeed, in October, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned that the U.S. faced the threat of a "cyber Pearl Harbor" if it failed to adequately protect these systems, echoing a warning CIA Director John Deutsch gave to Congress in 1996 about an electronic Pearl Harbor (...