Uni entrepreneurs defend against internet attack
[ UniNews Vol. 13, No. 20
1 - 15 November 2004 ]
A product designed to defend organisations from malicious internet attacks by so-called zombie computers has won a team of University of Melbourne business students the 2004 Melbourne University Entrepreneurs Challenge (MUEC).
The product, Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, stops clusters of computers that have been programmed to attack organisations internet operations and deny service to the companys clients.
Developed in conjunction with the University of Melbournes Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, the product applies sophisticated algorithms to an historical database of internet traffic to defeat existing and new DdoS attacks. The initial invention phase of the product occurred when team member Dr Tao Peng as a PhD student in the ARCs Special Research Centre of Ultra-Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN) in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Melbourne.
The team behind DDoS, called Intelligard, was named winner of the $30,000 first prize in the Entrepreneurs Challenge at Melbourne Town Hall recently as part of the City of Melbournes Melbourne Business Week.
The prize was sponsored by Hewlett Packard and presented by Victorian Treasurer, Minister for State and Regional Development, and Minister for Innovation, John Brumby.
Other entrepreneurial teams to compete successfully in this years challenge were MicroP and Message Stick, both winning $10,000 HP sponsored runner-up prizes, and IVT, which won a $5000 Biotech prize from the City of Melbourne.
Now in its fifth year, the Melbourne University Entrepreneurs Challenge (MUEC) is a business plan competition that sees teams of budding entrepreneurs compete on how to launch an innovative idea in the marketplace.
MUEC is organised by students from the Universitys Melbourne Business School and undergraduates from the University of Melbourne, and is open to teams of entrepreneurs where at least one team member is a student from a Victorian tertiary institution.
A member of the MUEC organising team and student at Melbourne Business School, Mr Christopher Brown, says the aim of the Challenge is to foster entrepreneurship and provide an opportunity for the world-class research being conducted in Victorian universities to be developed into viable and rewarding business ventures.
Finalists in the competition this year were all focused on innovations in IT and Biotech/Health Services, but Mr Brown says the teams were not judged on the science involved.
Science is someone elses area of expertise. We were simply looking at the viability of plans presented from a business context, identifying the strongest candidate to make the most out of an innovative idea.
Judges for the competition included venture capitalists, established business identities and angel investors.
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