As you know, my company Tech Experts sponsors a program we call No Virus Wednesdays to help computer users eradicate spam, spyware, trojans and viruses from their computers. It's been hugely successful, and we've helped a lot of clients speed up their computers and protect their sensitive personal information. Because we do so much of this work, I'm always on the look out for interesting angles on how the viruses are designed.

I owe my friend Nathan a big thank you for this interesting post. MessageLabs (www.messagelabs.com) commissioned Russian artist Alex Dragulescu to create graphical representations of Internet viruses and trojans, based on the actual code of the malware. He's developed a number of images, and each corresponds to the structure of the virus.

I was really amazed to see how much these computer viruses actually look like living viruses, like the one that gives you things like the common cold. They're beautiful images, but scary to think about.

For the English majors out there.... I did research the plural of virus - and it is viruses, not viri or virii. Check it out here on wikipedia.