Fergie's Tech Blog

Drawing a (Scary) Face On Malicious Software

Brian Krebs writes on Security Fix:

If the phishing scams, computer viruses and worms that land in our inboxes each day take the form of hostile-looking beasts, we might all want to avoid them like the plague. Such is the vision of Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu, whose stunning renderings of some of the more prevalent nasties out there helps put a menacing face to malware such as "Storm," and "Netsky."

Dragulescu, a research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sociable Media Group, created his so-called "threat art" in conjunction with live malware intercepted by e-mail security firm MessageLabs. Each is disassembled into a dump of binary code and then run through a program Dragulescu wrote. That program spends a few hours crunching through all the data, looking for patterns in the code that will determine the shape, color and complexity of each piece of threat art.

posted by Fergie @ 1/18/2008 12:26:00 PM