On the Evolution of Malware Species.
Vasileios Vlachos, Christos Ilioudis, Αλέξανδρος Παπανικολάου · 2011
Computer viruses have evolved from funny artifacts which were crafted mostly to annoy inexperienced users to sophisticated tools for industrial espionage, unsolicited bulk email (ube), piracy and other illicit acts. Despite the steadily increasing number of new malware species, we observe the formation of monophyletic clusters. In this paper, using public available data, we demonstrate the departure of the democratic virus writing model in which even moderate programmers managed to create successful virus strains to an entirely aristocratic ecosystem of highly evolved malcode.