Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, has announced a patent pending for Cyber Vaccine™, a tool developed by Charles River staff to predict and defend against cyberattacks.

In 2016, US companies and government agencies suffered over 1,000 data breaches. In 2017, the number of incidents surpassed 1,500, over a 40% increase than the previous year. We’ve witnessed countless high-profile data breaches in 2018, as well. Cyber defense is a notoriously difficult task because the attacker often strikes with a novel attack before effective defenses can be prepared against that attack. With US security often the intended target, we need a cyber defense that prevents attacks from happening in the first place.

The Charles River cyber security experts have championed Cyber Vaccine, a tool that anticipates attacks and prepares defenses before they occur. This significant scientific and technological development has practical applications in cyber security because the vaccine stops attacks from reaching our computers or data.

“In this invention, we developed a method to augment malware detection systems by predicting signatures of future malware variants. We inject these variants into the defensive system as a cyber vaccine,” said Dr. Avi Pfeffer, Chief Scientist at Charles River. “Cyber Vaccine predicts future attacks and creates signatures for them before they occur. These predicted attacks can then be used to prepare defenses against the future attacks.”

This patent reflects Charles River’s commitment to develop novel, intelligent solutions for cyber defense. CyMod™, our cyber modeling and reactive agent framework, provides a tool to integrate intelligent cyber adversaries into simulation environments. Under the MAAGI and SESAME efforts, we developed a tool to detect and analyze malware attacks by identifying their essential “genetic” properties that persist across generations of malware. Our cyber vaccine builds on these efforts by predicting the future evolution of malware.”