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Viruses revealed in all their gory glory

Messagelabs reveals all
Wed Mar 05 2008, 06:05

THOSE wacky funsters at Messagelabs have commisioned an artist to create images of some of the most popular [Eh? - Ed] viruses currently whizzing around the InterWeb.

Alex Dragulescu has developed images that show what the threats look like based on the actual code. Fifteen of the little blighters have been immortalised, including the ever lovely Netsky.

alt='netsky'
Netsky virus

Check out the rest of its chums over here. µ

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Comments
Sorry to be a killjoy..

..but questions like "what does a computer virus look like" make no sense at all!
You may as well ask "what's the colour of the concept of friendship?"
And what code is involved in a phishing link upon which to base a picture? 
On a less anal note, the pics look cool and more inspired by biology than technology.

posted by : KillJoy, 05 March 2008 Complain about this comment
Pollens

I vote the Vole's Office Assistants be used instead. They're all members of the dreaded lurgy and BSOD.

They bang in so often, I suspect they caught the acute grip from Ms. Dewey!

But only Larry knows for sure.
MS Bob's your uncle!)

posted by : karlsbad, 05 March 2008 Complain about this comment
Awesome

The color of friendship is blue. :P

You can take the code that makes a computer virus and run it into an imaging program that would make the images seen.

posted by : crash, 06 March 2008 Complain about this comment
Brilliant Idea

The team along with the artist must have had a blast doing those images.

Just look at how the "keylogger" has it's "connections" to send data back to it's master, the "phishing spam" is very "hairy", to say the least and you can actually see the P2P subnets in the "Storm bot".

As someone who has had to deal with those problems, I find those images absolutely brilliant.

posted by : Ríkharður Egilsson, 07 March 2008 Complain about this comment
code for phish/spam mails

Killjoy - the 'code' for phishing mails or spam mails is just the mail text itself - plus meta data like country of origin, rDNS of origin IP, etc. It's just the malware where malicious code was used.
Of course the images in their current form don't have much practical use but the exercise is more art for the sake of PR/marketing than a scientific study. Interestingly, tests have shown that the algorithm used to determine shapes/textures/colours does produce similar forms for threats in the same family. The images aren't just dreamt up in other words. In one case an image was produced for some piggyback malware, the image came out along the lines of those above but with a parasitic looking blob attached to it's side.

posted by : DB, 07 March 2008 Complain about this comment
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