What does a computer virus look like, really?

No one really know for sure. But a partnership between security services provider MessageLabs and artist Alex Dragulescu has provided one answer.

Dragulescu, a Romanian-born artist who first made his name by designing so-called so-called "spam plants," moved on to modeling viruses, worms, and phishing attempts late last year, at the behest of MessageLabs. With the spam, Draglescu took actual spam emails, stripped them down to their basic text, header, and URL information, and looked for relationships that he could exploit artistically using his own algorithms. The idea was to create something more aesthetically pleasing.

For MessageLabs, what Dragulescu saw as art the company saw as a more useful tool. To develop antivirus signatures, both Draglescu and MessageLabs' security researches have to break malware code down to understand it: where it attacks, what it writes or copies, and where it sends any stolen information. The company approached the artist and asked him to apply his craft to some of the more prevalent malware.

"What we thought was so interesting is that the security industry for more than 10 years has taken the same approach with threats, such as malware or spyware, that we intercept on a daily basis," said Paul Wood, a senior analyst at MessageLabs.

What Dragulescu came up with mimics the biological appearance of a virus, but is interpreted through the artists' rules: a virus is green, spam is reddish, phishing emails are blue, a Trojan is pink, spyware is purple, and a blue-green object is simply a malicious link. Other characteristics, such as the tendrils of the virus, are determined by attributes such as the number of connections it makes, Wood said.