IT Security Experts Use Plants to Fight Virus Attacks

You might not think a case of Dutch Elm disease has anything in common with last summer's MSBlast computer worm, but a number of biologists and computer security experts are beginning to see some similarities between the two. According to an article by Robert Lemos on CNET News.com, experts are finding a link between the way a disease devastates an agricultural crop and the way a virus attacks Internet infrastructure. Lemos says a reliance on one type of technology, software or protocol creates a digital "monoculture." In biology, a monoculture is any ecosystem vulnerable to disastrous harm from a single disease. Experts have seen a vulnerable digital monoculture attacked during last summer's MSBlast virus, where a single foreign entity infected the susceptible hosts of an entire population of Windows computers. "Biological viruses can mutate rapidly, create novel pathogenic and transmission routes and develop antigenic variation to evade host immunity," wrote microbiologists Trudy M. Wassenaar and Martin J. Blaser in a letter to a journal of the federal Center for Disease Control. "In the computer world, worms exhibit similar behavior." Lemos says that despite the obvious differences between the two fields, some researchers are applying agriculture to technology. Just as biologists advise farmers to diversify their plantings, computer researchers say developers should be given tools to vary characteristics of the same program so that not all will be hobbled by a virus written for a specific version.

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