When Peter Huang left his native China to study plant genetics in the United States, it seemed unlikely he would wind up battling cyber-viruses in Ottawa.
But when his post-doctoral experiment was taking years to complete, his visa was running out and he was having no luck securing a green card, he immigrated to Canada, abandoning his dissertation and settling in Ottawa just before the high-tech sector reached its apex.
It would end up being a career-changing move. He took up computer programming and quickly became fascinated with the speed at which malicious viruses such as SQL Slammer spread across the Internet.
Huang decided to put his fascination to work by founding IT security startup OS Security, which just came out of whisper mode, claiming its software identifies known or unknown threats at the operating system level.
The firm is tagging this approach as the new way to combat viruses, since it breaks away from the status quo of other leading anti-virus software solutions, such as Symantec's Norton, which scans files at the application level, Huang said.
And even though Huang is now plugged in to the computer world, he finds many similarities to his past life in biology.
"When I first began working on this, I realized (viruses) ... have to use some sort of resource to replicate, just like a biological virus such as HIV," he said, suggesting both cyber-virus and biological virus need to feed off something to survive.
It's this feeding process OS Security claims it can detect, giving it the clues it needs to track down the virus before it infiltrates operating systems.
OS Security president Kam Kwok also uses biology to explain his company's approach.
"We detect the malicious behaviour of the attack, just like when you have a cancer cell. It draws resources. We detect that process rather than the cancer cell itself. When they want to use certain resources, we check to see if it's valid. If not, that's where we trap (the virus)."
With other software solutions, once the malicious attack is out in the open, it's identified and a protection signature is created, he said. But this doesn't enable the solution to constantly evolve along with a dynamic threat, forcing users to constantly update their anti-virus software, he added.
Signature scanners scan system memory, disks and files and compare their contents against a database of known signatures, observed a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. But "because of the proliferation of new viruses, these databases must be frequently updated to remain current".
"The user has to keep paying (for the updates) and that's the business model," said Kwok, referring to the approach of some competitors. "But for us it's a one-time cost."
Other methods include behaviour blockers, which attempt to monitor the system environment in real time, looking for program instructions that may have detrimental effects and interrupting processing before the damage can occur.
New studies suggest threats from viruses are on the rise, making cybersecurity a growing market opportunity. A 2002 study by the International Computer Association showed 100 per cent of businesses surveyed had experienced at least one virus encounter within the past 12 months. In the same survey, 74 per cent of respondents felt the overall problem had worsened since the previous year.
