Carnegie Mellon University to Study Cyber Terrorism

Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University has been awarded a 5-year grant by the U.S. Defense Department that is reportedly worth $35.5 million. As part of the grant, Carnegie Mellon will research and develop tools and methods for combating cyber terrorism and system security breaches. Carnegie has created a new Center for Computer and Communications Security, which will study engineering artificial intelligence into hardware so that a hacker attack can be recognized, and the part of the system being hacked can shut itself down. Voice scans, fingerprint and iris patterns, and face recognition are also being studied as methods of authenticating a computer user's total identity. Dr. Pradeep Khosla heads the new Center for Computer and Communications Security and expressed this thought, "These problems have always existed. Terrorism only increased the visibility of these problems."