  Recent advances in anti-malware technologies have steered the security
industry away from maintaining vast signature databases and into newer defence
technologies such as behaviour blocking, application whitelisting and others.
Most would agree that the reasoning behind this is to keep up with the arms
race established between malware writers and the security community almost
three decades ago. Still, malware writers have not as yet created new
paradigms. Indeed, malicious code development is still largely limited to code
pattern changes utilizing polymorphic and metamorphic engines, as well as
executable packer and wrapper technologies. Each new malware instance retains
the exact same core functionality as its ancestor and only alters the way it
looks. What if, instead, malware were able to change its function or behaviour
autonomously? What if, in the absence of human intervention, computer viruses
resembled biological viruses in their ability to adapt to new defence
technologies as soon as they came into effect? In this paper, we will provide
the theoretical proof behind malware implementation that closely models
Darwinian evolution.
