The National Science Foundation announced Tuesday that it has granted more than $12 million to academic researchers for the creation of two centers to investigate infectious code and study the Internet's ecology. . . .
The funds set aside for the centers are part of the NSF's Cyber Trust program, through which the foundation has granted a total of $30 million to 33 projects focused on researching ways to provide better information security.

The Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses, or the CIED, will work to understand how digital diseases such as worms and viruses spread across the Internet, and how epidemics can be defeated. The Security Through Interaction Modeling, STIM, Center will draw parallels with nature's ecology to understand the complex interaction between machines, humans and cyberattacks.

"These centers, as well as our other funded activities, are looking not only for new ways to cope with imperfections in today's systems but also for the knowledge and techniques to build better systems in the future," Carl Landwehr, the NSF's program director for Cyber Trust, said in a statement.

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