Die, evil malware! (Image: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features)

ALERT to a sudden threat, you race down a virtual corridor of servers, hot on the tail of malicious software. You ping a message to your partner, pointing them to a bottleneck in the network which should let you pin down the malware and destroy it before it does any more harm. Doing your job has never been so much fun.

This is a long way away from traditional IT security, but the drama of video gaming actually enables analysts to watch over their networks more effectively. Developed at the Lincoln Laboratory, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the approach allows people to patrol their assigned environments as if they were playing a first-person shooter – much like in the cult film Tron.

Humans are important in network security because they are still more adept than algorithms at filtering out false alarms. The job typically involves scanning lists of IP addresses corresponding to the various computers in a network. Colour coding, symbols and graphs can help operators sift through the huge volumes of data for signs of intruders – unfamiliar IP addresses trying to access the network, for example. It’s important work, but can be rather dull. A dramatic 3D environment means analysts can deal with far more data, says Jeremy Kepner of MIT.


His system, developed over the last three years with MIT colleague Matthew Hubbell, combines data from network access control systems with existing plans of the building that houses an organisation’s computers. These are fed into a gaming engine called Unity, which generates a navigable 3D environment.

The analysts’ avatars can teleport around the network they are assigned to protect, using a keyboard and mouse or a Playstation controller to investigate and block intrusions. If part of the network detects an anomaly and so seems to be under attack it flashes red, appears to catch fire or can even explode, using built-in animations. “Players” can then dash across the corporate complex and shut a machine down if it is under attack.

The analysts’ avatars can teleport around a network and shut a machine down if it is under attack

Other players show up in the game, allowing a team to cooperate in a way that is more natural than screen-sharing or teleconferencing. “Everyone can see everyone else,” Kepner says. “You could say, ‘Follow me while I walk over to this machine that’s behaving weirdly’, and people could be in physically different places while having this interaction.”

Making the first-person shooter world seem realistic is key to making the “game” effective, says Kepner. “The moment I add all this context to the environment – grass, gravel, cars and buildings – it turns out that the amount of information we can push to the analysts is far greater,” he says.

Kepner says the game was tested successfully on a 5000-machine network. It was presented at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference in Waltham, Massachusetts, last month.

Frank Zinghini, CEO of visualisation software company Applied Visions, says the concept of building real-world functions into a navigable 3D environment is “phenomenal”. “The gameplay metaphor is very compelling to get people to interact with the work,” he says.

Though players can’t yet gun down the malware in hand-to-hand combat, that may not be far off. “The challenge isn’t in the technology,” says Zinghini. What is important is making the game as immersive as possible without compromising the work that network analysts do, he adds.

Turn training into gaming Games can liven up dull tasks in all walks of life. A Boston firm called True Office has turned the compliance course, normally guaranteed to make an office worker’s heart sink, into a comic-style app. The idea is that most people would rather learn about what constitutes sexual harassment by quizzing a virtual boss about her relationship with a handsome employee than trawl through tedious checklists and Powerpoint slides. The US Department of Defense is also spicing up the training process. CyberCIEGE teaches network security concepts through a gamified office environment. Like The Sims for IT workers, networking mistakes can result in computers bursting into virtual flames.