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US Working On Security Cyborg
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2009-02-27
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You know those guys in Oak Ridge, TN that made the world's first atomic bomb? Well now they're making cyborgs.
Okay, so it's not the same guys, just the same lab, and Oak Ridge hasn't worked on (so they say, anyway) nuclear stuff since the Manhattan Project in 1943. Straight out of Star Trek or The Matrix (Mormons have the Bible and the Book of Latter Day Saints, Geeks have Trek and Matrix), the Oak Ridge boys have created self-aware, telepathic robots to protect the nation's security infrastructure.
That's good, because the password progress apparently wasn't putting up enough of a fight against hackers sophisticated and ballsy enough to actually hack the Pentagon. You guys should have tried password. They'd never guess something so obvious.
The Ubiquitous Network Transient Autonomous Mission Entities (UNTAME) are pretty wild about Heuristic Identification and Tracking of Insider Threat (HIT-IT) (seriously) and work in concert to seek and destroy network intruders. The cybots, as they are called in more simple fashion, are "aware" of the condition and activities of other cybots in the collective.
What's really freaky about the cybots is that they are not centrally controlled. They consist of mobile, autonomous software wired for specific missions. "A cybot is more intelligent than agent," Oak Ridge's Joe Trien said. "When you've lost an agent, you've lost it. But a cybot is intended to work with other cybots, continue their mission or regenerate when necessary so they can pick up where one left off."
Kind of like having unlimited lives in a video game.
These cybots seem to be reactionary rather the preemptive-that is, they detect an intruder, seek and destroy them. Recently, a US military colonel wrote an op-ed for a military journal to make the case for a similar set of intelligent cybots, whose mission was to detect an attack before it reached critical networks, not just standing at the gates and guarding, but actively seeking out and destroying malicious bots on the network in advance.
Oak Ridge's new cyborg creation could be a step on the road to that type of system. Let the countdown begin till when we hear loud complaints that the Pentagon's borg mistook an innocent cyber entity as an enemy combatant.
About the Author:
SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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