ON THE ATTACK

In the continuing war against cybercrime, the U.S. Army Research Office has enlisted a new ally – the University of Houston.

A team of computer science researchers at UH has been awarded a three-year grant to develop proactive measures to combat hackers by mimicking likely targets of attacks.

“We will generate new attacks of our own,” said Rakesh Verma, computer science professor and co-principal investigator. “Cyber criminals are getting more creative at each turn, so the idea is to be one step ahead of any type of attack.”

The goal is to generate novel attacks on a daily basis using adversarial machine learning to help develop new, ingenious filters to ward off those possible attacks. The detectors will be continuously learning and improving themselves rather than passively waiting for attacks.

“We want to have that cycle of automatic improvement,” Verma said.