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By hunting through benign bits of code on your computer, the Frankenstein virus can turn itself into something rather nasty...
The monstrous virus software, dubbed Frankenstein, was created by Vishwath Mohan and Kevin Hamlen at the University of Texas at Dallas. Having infected a computer, it searches the bits and bytes of common software such as Internet Explorer and Notepad for snippets of code called gadgets - short instructions that perform a particular kind of small task.
Previous research has shown that it is theoretically possible, given enough gadgets, to construct any computer program. Mohan and Hamlen set out to show that Frankenstein could build working malware code by having it create two simple algorithms purely from gadgets. "The two test algorithms we chose are simpler than full malware, but they are representative of the sort of core logic that real malware uses to unpack itself," says Hamlen. "We consider this a strong indication that this could be scaled up to full malware."
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