- Gates Boosts Waste Management, Coca Cola Stakes
- Stocks Overvalued; Recession to Return: Whitney
- What's Kept Stock Rally Going? Fear, Not Confidence
- Fed to Keep Rates Low Despite Dollar's Fall: Bernanke
- Millions Could Have to Repay Part of Obama's Tax Credit
- Hollywood Turns to Porn as Unemployment Rises
- Slideshow: US Cities With Most Underwater Mortgages
- Solar Energy Emerges From a Dark Period
- Gold Is in a 'Bubble' And Will Keep Going Higher: Gartman
- Answers to Your Questions: A Path to Economic Disaster?
- 5 Ways to Play the Chinese Markets: Analyst
- Meredith Whitney: Turns Bearish
- 3 Stock Plays on Rising College Costs
- Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Almost Doubles Wal-Mart Holdings During Summer
- Nov. 16: Unusual Volume Leaders
- Getting to the Heart of the Merck-Abbott Embargo Break
- What MGM's Sale Could Say About Value of Content
- My Ratings on Lowe's & Home Depot: Analyst
- Going high-tech to track Alzheimer’s patients
- SunPower investigates possible accounting errors
- SVB Financial to offer $300M of common stock
- Watchdog: Gov't overpaid to bail out AIG
- Report: Foreclosure crisis hits blacks, Latinos
- Starwood Property posts 3Q net loss
- Coca-Cola sees massive global sales growth
- Associated Banc-Corp appoints Flynn as CEO
- NeurogesX gets FDA approval for pain patch
SAN FRANCISCO - Cyber threats like NetSky, Mydoom and Parite are the bane of IT departments around the globe, but artist Alex Dragulescu has found subtle beauty deep within the dangerous computer code that can bring down networks and bombard e-mail inboxes with murderous spam.
Dragulescu has peeled back the code behind the world's worst tech bugs and rendered stunning images from it. The Romanian-born MIT researcher and artist was commissioned to do fashion the artwork by MessageLabs, a computer security company that sought to put a face — or at least a shape — on computer viruses.
Dragulescu found interesting, recurring patterns. He used the data to coax pointy green tentacles from the dreaded 'Mydoom' e-mail worm and grew pretty peach petals from the epicenter of the 'Degreediploma5' spam file.
"I think there is beauty in their complexity," Dragulescu said at a gallery debut of his work in San Francisco. "These types of threats are very smart. Very intelligent in design. Digital organisms, really, that adapt themselves and replicate. We wanted to capture some of that complexity and uniqueness."
The process of creating the art was like none other. MessageLabs carefully sent Dragulescu the once-harmful files after modifying them so his computers would not contract the viruses.
Dragulescu looked for the frequency of certain occurrences in a virus, such as particular network sockets that it was designed to compromise. He fed the resulting data into a program he created with an algorithm to grow the viruses and Trojans visually.
"The number of occurrences would determine how branching develops. Another example would be how curly the tentacles get," Dragulescu said.
Dragulescu's next project will be creating abstract portraits of people based on the contents of their blogs and the types of online communities they inhabit.
- Where, what, how.
- CNBC's Jim Goldman asks: Has the sun begun to set on Twitter? Data suggests its best days are over.
- Everyone wanted a piece of Madoff's "Bullship"--the famous buoy sold for $7,500 at auction. You won't believe these prices.
- De Loach Vineyards is selling its pinot noir the old fashioned way, helping to cut energy and transportation costs.
- Why are the Chinese concerned about the progress of U.S. health care legislation?
- CNBC's Maria Bartiromo talks to rapper Snoop Dogg about brand identity in both business and music.








