Time Immortal

So true.

“…younger workers will use your corporate network to run most any device, technology or social networking software they can get their hands on. Dubbed “Millenials,” these workers born after 1980 are nearly twice as likely to use cell phones and PDAs at work, and half admit to installing unauthorized software on their employer’s computers. On the upside, the Millenials are more security aware than their older co-workers.”

When they’re not causing security risks by updating their MySpace profiles during lunch breaks and downloading music, chat applications, and a host of other bits of media content that have traditionally served as vectors for malware and viruses, that is.

That’s what makes IT such a challenging field — you have to be smarter than the other users, and stay one step ahead of the craftiest cube-dweller. People will use proxies to get around firewalls, so you have to be able to identify and block proxies. People will try and use chat programs, reach Facebook, download games, watch videos, update their iPods, and so forth. To say nothing of the hosts of malicious programs that can get in by any number of means, even email.

It’s a challenge, to say the least.

I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong with this idea.

Microsoft researchers are hoping to use “information epidemics” to distribute software patches more efficiently.

Milan Vojnovi? and colleagues from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, want to make useful pieces of information such as software updates behave more like computer worms: spreading between computers instead of being downloaded from central servers.

The research may also help defend against malicious types of worm, the researchers say.

Software worms spread by self-replicating. After infecting one computer they probe others to find new hosts. Most existing worms randomly probe computers when looking for new hosts to infect, but that is inefficient, says Vojnovi?, because they waste time exploring groups or “subnets” of computers that contain few uninfected hosts.

Smart strategies

Vojnovi?’s team have designed smarter strategies that can exploit the way some subnets provide richer pickings than others.

The ideal approach uses prior knowledge of the way uninfected computers are spread across different subnets. A worm with that information can focus its attention on the most fruitful subnets – infecting a given proportion of a network using the smallest possible number of probes.

But although prior knowledge could be available in some cases – a company distributing a patch after a previous worm attack, for example – usually such perfect information will not be available. So the researchers have also developed strategies that mean the worms can learn from experience.

You know what my favourite part of the Windows update process is at present? That I can refuse certain updates, or at least choose when they are installed. I like the “hands on” approach. I’m somewhat less comfortable with the idea that Microsoft “benevolent infections” are out there wandering around various subnets looking for the next un-updated PC to “benevolently infect.”

Admittedly, though, it would be funny watching something like NOD32 swatting down update after update as it tries to install.

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