Visualizing Viruses
Thursday, June 12th, 2008Wired 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.
