I will discuss some of the fundamental theories of evolution surrounding parasitology - how hosts and parasites coevolve. That is, when a host's defense improve parasites mutate to find another attack vector. Following these theories I'm able to show how similar this process is to malware evolving against host OS's and security systems. By expanding from there I am able to show some predictions about how malware will evolve over time. By drawing from research in biology and epidemiology we can have a better idea of how malware will continue to change in the future. This gives us an idea how our jobs will change (or won't), the importance of training and keeping up to date, and how organizations can/should try to stay agile.

Adam Hogan got his start in security by learning Snort and other open source tools instead of attending class, and has been snorting fort the past decade. Sourcefire eventually hired him to write their training manuals and classes. He now works as a Consulting Security Engineer for Sourcefire (now part of Cisco). Adam lives in Columbus and spends his free time using video games to avoid working on his dissertation.

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