The Friday Fillip

This week’s fillip is about malware — and the tip comes from Mr. Bonware himself, Michael Lines.

Malwarez is a project of Alex Dragulescu and takes what is wretched and makes it fascinating, if not beautiful. The idea is — Wait, it’s Friday for heaven’s sake: I’ll let Alex tell you about it and save my breath for the snow-shovelling that is the new normal here in Snowronto:

Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. 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. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.

The spawn of these pathogens are in fact lovely to look at — through the lens of an algorithm.