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Predicting Vulnerable PCs – Microsoft Kicks Off New Initiative

Microsoft Launches New Anti-Malware Initiative

Microsoft has just kicked off their latest cyber security initiative.  The company is offering up a $25,000 award for data scientists who can correctly predict which Windows PCs are more likely to fall victim to malware attacks.   So far, over 80 teams have joined the challenge.  The data scientists will have 90 days to develop an algorithm to determine the probability of malicious infections executing successfully.  Chase Thomas and Robert McCann, members of the Windows Defender Research team, state,

“The goal of this competition is to predict a Windows machine’s probability of getting infected by various families of malware, based on different properties of that machine.  Not all machines are equally likely to get malware; competitors will help build models for identifying devices that have a higher risk of getting malware so that preemptive action can be taken.”

The end goal is for Microsoft to use this information in expanding their layered defense approach to cyber security threats.

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