Researchers at the University of Missouri hope to employ a new strategy in the ongoing struggle to protect digital information in the cloud from targeted cyber attacks. The strategy establishes a new artificial intelligence system to combat digital intrusions and protect people’s personal information that gets stored electronically often in the cloud during online purchases.
Shri Prasad Calyam, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Director of Cyber Education and Research Initiative in the MU College of Engineering, said, “We are interested in the targeted attacks where the attacker is trying to exploit data or critical infrastructure resources such as blocking data access, tampering facts and stealing data.”
The researchers have focused on two types of cyber attacks, those seeking customer data and those stealing resources such as bitcoins, a type of digital currency. Their strategy uses artificial intelligence techniques and psychology principles, giving the cyber attackers false hope that the attack is working.
Shri Prasad Calyam added, “Our ‘defense by pretense’ system quarantines the attacker and allows the cloud operators to buy time and build a stronger defense for their systems. The quarantine is a decoy that behaves very similar to the real compromised target to keep the attacker assuming that the attack is still succeeding. In typical cyber attacks, the more deeply attackers go in the system, the more they have the ability to go into many directions. It becomes like a Whack-A-Mole game for those defending the system. Our strategy simply changes the game, but makes the attackers think they are being successful.” Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com