The (Un)Natural History of Malware

An illustrated bestiary of malware creatures, drawn with charm and precision by a security professional.

ILOVEYOU spread across the globe in hours and infected tens of millions of systems. Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges at a nuclear facility without firing a shot. WannaCry paralyzed hospitals around the world on a Friday afternoon. We have names for these things. What we don’t have is a way to classify them.

Lena Yu does. She has spent years treating malware like a Victorian naturalist would treat a newly discovered species: with observation, taxonomy, illustration, and disciplined curiosity about what the organism actually does.

The (Un)Natural History of Malware catalogs ten landmark specimens, from ILOVEYOU to Raspberry Robin, the way field naturalists catalog creatures. Anatomy mapped to function. Behavior explained ecologically. History traced with care. Each specimen is hand-drawn in the style of natural history engravings and given a formal Lenaean name encoding its habitat, behavior, and defining trait. Seen this way, the famous names of malware history stop being code and start being organisms you can observe.

Part pop science, part security history, this book is for the analyst who wants to think differently about what they study, and for anyone who has wondered what, exactly, these things are.