Absolutely fantastic news from the recent E&T Awards. E&T is magazine of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET's) and the annual awards, this year hosted by Dr Shini Somara celebrate ground-breaking innovations from the world of Science, Engineering, Technology and Maths (STEM).

Inflame, BT's epidemiological malware modelling tool won both the Innovation awards for Intelligent Systems and Cyber Security, as well as taking a silver prize for overall Innovation.

In the modern world, ransomware is a critical threat facing businesses and national infrastructure. Pedro Marques, Jonathan Roscoe, Dylan Jones and Luke Booth presented Inflame, a malware simulation and response tool that utilises epidemiological modelling and deep reinforcement learning to forecasts threats and help determine necessary defensive actions.

Inflame’s automated responses to cybersecurity threats are able to cut response times to a matter of seconds, easing the pressure on analysts and allowing experts to explore the potential effects of new threats, saving large amounts of money and preventing terrible damage. The tool has been deployed by Eagle-i, BT’s new security platform.

The judges considered that the application of epidemiological threat modelling and reinforcement learning to the fight against malware is “a significant innovation in an area where continual improvement is desperately needed to keep up with ever-evolving threats and to react faster to time-critical incidents”.