"Researchers Strengthen Defenses Against Common Cyberattack"
Scientists have developed a method that improves the detection of a common Internet attack by 90 percent compared to current methods. The new technique developed by computer scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) of the US Department of Energy (DOE) monitors the Internet's ever-changing traffic patterns. PNNL scientist Omer Subasi presented the findings on August 2 at the IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Resilience, where the manuscript was deemed the best research paper presented at the conference. The scientists modified the standard playbook for detecting Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, in which attackers attempt to bring down a website by bombarding it with requests. In order to increase detection accuracy, the PNNL team sidestepped thresholds and instead focused on the evolution of entropy, a measure of system disorder. This article continues to discuss the new method PNNL researchers developed to recognize a common Internet attack.