'Human' computer to stamp out fraud

NEWS Luxuriating in the unwieldy title of Computational Immunology for Fraud Detection, the program, which is under development at King's College, London, will detect fraud, intrusions from hackers and viruses in much the same way as the human body deals with hostile organisms. Part of a £15m initiative from the DTI aimed at reassuring the public that it is safe to deal over the web, the program burrows into a company's computers seeking out abnormalities which it then flags for attention. Using a computing algorithm developed by Stephanie Forrest, professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico, the software monitors the computer system it's being hosted on to form a template of normal activity. Once it has built this model it then looks for any transaction or activity differing from that model, initially alerting a human operator to the problem. Its human minder then helps the software to develop antidotes which the computer creates multiple copies of in the same way that the human body spawns its own antibodies. This in effect gives the system the ability to mop up activities like denial of service attacks automatically. But according to Dr Richard Overill, one of the academics developing the technology at King's, human operators will still take responsibility for the majority of responses for safety reasons. He said: "At the moment we are not looking for an automated response if the system finds something it is not used to." The system's likely first user is the Post Office, where it will mine through Post Office databases looking for fraudulent transactions. The system is currently under test on the Post Office Counters database, suggesting that one early target could be the £6bn worth of benefit fraud in the UK, which has long been a thorn in the side of the Government. The software, costing around £600,000, is a joint venture between the Post Office, the DTI, King's College and Anite Systems, and is part of a raft of initiatives the government plans to develop in response to industry concerns over about encouraging e-business.