Internet Epidemiology and "Ecology"

NSF - OLPA - PR 04-124: NSF Announces Two Cybersecurity Centers to Study Internet Epidemiology and "Ecology" - :
Researchers will study Internet viruses with methods used in tracking the outbreak of organic epidemics.

"The Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses will be led by Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and Vern Paxson of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), affiliated with UC Berkeley. The center, with expected five-year funding of $6.2 million, will be dedicated to wiping out those plagues of the Internet, worms and viruses that infect thousands upon thousands of computers and cause billions of dollars in down time, network congestion and potentially lost data.

"Taking cues from the field of epidemiology, the center will work to understand how the Internet's open communications and software vulnerabilities permit worms to propagate, to devise a global-scale early warning system to detect epidemics in their early stages, to develop forensics capabilities for analyzing wide-ranging infections, and to develop techniques and devices that can suppress outbreaks before they reach pandemic proportions."