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Funded by DARPA, the government agency that commissions far-out research for the US Department of Defense, this is the Cyber Grand Challenge.
The computers are competing to be the best at a tedious and challenging task that human cybersecurity researchers do every day: find a bug in a software program, then fix it. Right now there aren't enough skilled people to do that job, so this technology could take pressure off IT departments everywhere struggling to stay on top of vulnerabilities in their computer systems.
The number of vulnerabilities in computer software running in the world is impossible to know. Cybersecurity firm Symantec estimated in its 2016 report on internet security threats that researchers across the industry found more than 5,500 new vulnerabilities in 2015 alone. Those bugs tend to stick around, as programmers copy-paste outdated software into new products, and users like you and me forget to update our software.
This new technology, experts say, will also give cyberdefenders a much needed advantage in a war that right now heavily favors the bad guys. It's much easier to find one bug and exploit it than to defend against every single possible weakness in a computer system. This competition hopes to flip that script.
Funded by DARPA, the government agency that commissions far-out research for the US Department of Defense, this is the Cyber Grand Challenge.
The computers are competing to be the best at a tedious and challenging task that human cybersecurity researchers do every day: find a bug in a software program, then fix it. Right now there aren't enough skilled people to do that job, so this technology could take pressure off IT departments everywhere struggling to stay on top of vulnerabilities in their computer systems.
The number of vulnerabilities in computer software running in the world is impossible to know. Cybersecurity firm Symantec estimated in its 2016 report on internet security threats that researchers across the industry found more than 5,500 new vulnerabilities in 2015 alone. Those bugs tend to stick around, as programmers copy-paste outdated software into new products, and users like you and me forget to update our software.
This new technology, experts say, will also give cyberdefenders a much needed advantage in a war that right now heavily favors the bad guys. It's much easier to find one bug and exploit it than to defend against every single possible weakness in a computer system. This competition hopes to flip that script.