Recent post in Wired called “Visualizing Viruses” caught my eye. Here’s an explanation:
E-mail security company MessageLabs commissioned [Alex] Dragulescu [an MIT graduate student] to visualize the threats the company finds in the 3 million messages it scans daily. Dragulescu used algorithms to find recurring patterns in the source code of viruses and Trojans and then fed the results into a visualization algorithm.
I’m not sure what this means, but the accompanying pictures are one part beautiful and one part scary. Here’s the caption for the picture above:
This odd virus, called Parite, debuted in 2001. It wraps itself around every executable file it can find on a compromised host, and thus runs along with every program executed on the machine. Here Parite is shown with its tentacles wrapped around NetSky.