A Chinese cybersecurity mimic defence theory has surpassed odds by withstanding over 500,000 hacker attacks. The international challenge called Cyberspace Power, which ended on Saturday 12 May, was the first “Elite Challenge” on Cyber Mimic Defence capabilities and was held in Nanjing.
22 teams made up the foreign and Chinese “white hat hackers”, whom were tasked with attacking the system, which, according to Xinhua news, detected and blocked all attacks. The Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), that co-sponsored the event, told the agency the specialists used hacker techniques to try and break through the system that will be used to assist in cybersecurity.
Known in biology as Mimicry, the phenomena is the similarity of one organism to another that evolves due to a resemblance in behaviour, writes John Maynard Smith, for the Oxford University Press in Animal Signals. The Chinese cybersecurity mimic defence system operates in a similar fashion, effectively “mimicking” the behaviour of hacker attacks and creating an “ever changing software environment”.
“During the challenge, which concluded Saturday, bouts of attacks from several teams were frustrated even after they were given access to install backdoors to the system”, the CAE told Xinhua.
In nature, the Canadian tiger swallowtail caterpillar tricks birds into thinking it’s a snake, by mimicking the colour of leaves. Sensing a bird nearby it grows yellow and black rings that mimic the look of a pair of eyes, and inflates its body. Butterflies, snakes, snails, owls, chameleons and prey-mantas are among other animals that protect themselves against predators in this way.
