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Computer viruses are the rst and only form of arti cial life to have had a measurable impact on society.Currently, they are a r elatively manageable nuisance.However, two alarming trends are l i k e l y t o m a k e c omputer viruses a much greater threat.First, the rate at which new viruses are b eing written is high, and accelerating.Second, the trend towards increasing interconnectivity and interoperability among computers will enable computer viruses and worms to spread much more r apidly than they do today.To address these problems, we have designed an immune system for computers and computer networks that takes much of its inspiration from nature.Like the vertebrate immune system, our system develops antibodies to previously unencountered c omputer viruses or worms and remembers them so as to recognize and respond to them more quickly in the future.We are c areful to minimize the risk of an auto-immune response, in which the immune system mistakenly identi es legitimate software as being undesirable.We also employ nature's technique of ghting self-replication with self-replication, which our theoretical studies have shown to be highly e ective.Many components of the proposed immune system are already being used to automate computer virus analysis in our laboratory, and we anticipate that this technology will gradually be incorporated into IBM's commercial anti-virus product during the next year or two.