What do you get when you ask a bunch of digital artists to dream up a state-of-the-art tool for fighting cybercrime? A touchscreen interface, fit for a sci-fi starship, that lets researchers examine botnets in the same way biologists might study their own natural specimens.
The project was commissioned by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, whose investigators are tasked with fighting the internet’s bad guys. Earlier this year, it tapped The Office for Creative Research, a multidisciplinary digital design group based in New York, to come up with new ways of looking at one particular threat: botnets, the global networks of infected computers that cyber criminals enlist to do their bidding.
OCR came up with a prototype tool called Specimen Box. It has three different views, with bright, geometric graphics inspired in part by the interfaces of the movie War Games. The main view shows the activity of 15 botnets at a glance. Each is displayed as a sphere, like an organism in a petri dish; dots streaming in represent messages sent from infected computers. With the tool, researchers don’t just see the activity but hear it, too: Each botnet has its own unique audio signature, so the soundscape at any given moment reflects the balance of activity across the 15 specimens.
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