First there was intrusion detection, then intrusion prevention, and now, intrusion tolerance. A professor and researcher at George Mason University is readying the commercial rollout of a new, patent-pending technology that basically assumes an attack or infection on a server is inevitable, so it instead minimizes the impact of an intrusion. Called self-cleansing intrusion tolerance (SCIT), the new security method doesn’t replace IDS, IPS, firewalls, or other traditional security tools, but rather adds another layer that minimizes the damage of an attack, says Arun Sood, professor of computer science and director of the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Computer Science at GMU in Fairfax, Va.