Static in the Ether

Wired has a article on the Artwork done by MIT Media Lab’s grad student Alex Dragulescu. Working under contract to MessageLabs he has produced a number number of pictures, showing images of Mydoom, Ghost Keylogger and other bits of Malware.
While all quite pretty there seems to be no detail of how they were created in the original post although the MalWarez link on his homepage describes the process as follows:

..For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity.

The Storm Worm is probably my favorite visualizations. He also has an interesting set of images entitled SpamPlants, based on input relating to the ASCII character frequency of spam messages.

Now this sounds like a great project for an aspiring security researcher with a graphical bent.

I found this going through a backlog of ISN mail.

DEVELOPERS AT F-Secure have issued a challenge to hackers to find an
embedded message in a .EXE file.

The challenge looks quite tricky, and the winner gets a free ticket to
the T2′05 info sec conference in Finland, but unfortunately only if
she or he lives in Finland.

As well as figuring out the message, and sending it to a pre-defined
email address, information about the methods and tools must be
supplied.

There’s more information, and the rules of the challenge, here

Even tho I cant win a trip to the con, it should be fun trying to extract the data out he provided file. Hopefully when the competition closes, a solution will be released.