Don Earl Bailey

US Patent:

20150040217, Feb 5, 2015

Filed:

Aug 2, 2013

Appl. No.:

13/957967

Inventors:

- Armonk NY, US
Don T. Bailey - Fort Worth TX, US
Shane B. McElligott - Apex NC, US
Hien Q. Nguyen - Beaverton OR, US
Susan M. Romero - Seattle WA, US
Jeffrey D. Young - Raleigh NC, US

Assignee:

International Business Machines Corporation - Armonk NY

International Classification:

H04L 29/06

US Classification:

726 22

Abstract:

An approach for monitoring and protecting electronic data in a networked computing environment (e.g., a cloud computing environment) is provided. In a typical embodiment, an activity monitor gathers characteristics of data traffic of one or more virtual machines. The data traffic is analyzed to determine whether any of the data traffic is indicative of a malicious activity (e.g., unauthorized data transfers). If it appears a VM is engaging in malicious activity, then a counter for the VM is incremented by a predefined value that is associated with the malicious activity. When the counter for the VM exceeds a point threshold, a remediation action is taken with respect to the VM.