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Smart agents could one day roam computer networks hunting down viruses, says
IBM. Today’s antivirus software can only detect known viruses, so new ones can
be very dangerous. But IBM’s agents, which it is developing with the University
of Southampton, are based on neural network software that can be “trained” 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 “normal” computer behaviour, and it
alerts the system administrator if there are any departures from this.