US researchers have come up with a technique that claims to be able to stop Internet worms within milliseconds of an outbreak. The <A HREF="http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=8035">Proactive Worm Containment system,</A> as its inventors at Penn State University call it, uses no signatures to identify an attack. Instead it relies on the frequency of connections at a packet level, and analyzes the number of connections this traffic is making to other networks. This is said to counter one of the biggest issues in worm defense, namely that they spread at incredible speed before they can be stopped. By the time security systems have recovered, the damage is often done.