But is platform impact the same thing as provocative research? It’s an important question given that Stavridou-Coleman’s pre-Intel résumé is peppered with references to such topflight institutions as the University of London, Stanford, Oxford, and SRI International.

After all, in most malware tales of recent years, the underlying platforms have starred as fools, mindlessly executing instructions no matter how ill-intended the code. And mindless hardware doesn’t seem especially promising ground in which to dig for hardcore research gems.

Conventional wisdom holds, for example, that much of the recent spam from the Sober worm* came from broadband-connected consumer PCs that blithely spammed millions of addresses with infected e-mails. Infected machines quickly became zombies, spewing worm variants all over the Internet.

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