The Washington Post Security Fix blog (security_fix) has an interesting article this afternoon on the vision of Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu. Mr. Dragulescu has written a program that produces “threat art”. Dragulescu, a research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sociable Media Group, creates this 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. The art is derived based on the actions of the malware.
For example, one instance of the NetSky worm looks like:
I do recommend you read the article. Quite mesmerizing.
I could also see some interesting applications to this. Given the human capacity for recognizing patterns (something we do much better than computers), this might provide some intriguing ways of recognizing patters of malware behavior.
