US Patent 7620986 Defenses against software attacks in distributed computing environments

The invention provides apparatus and methods for defending against attacks in a distributed computing environment, including (1) distinguishing attack traffic patterns from legitimate traffic patterns, (2) responsive to nature of message patterns; (3) attack traffic has few origination points, and does not divide further from target device; (4) detectors of illegitimate traffic can cooperate to confirm the suspected attack, with the effect of providing more information to each other.