Reverse engineers often face a chunk of binary code with no idea what it does. In his TED talk, security researcher Chris Domas shows how visualisation helps. One trick plots every pair of consecutive bytes as a point on a 256 by 256 grid, so text, machine instructions and images each leave a distinctive pattern. Pattern recognition like this lets analysts spot structure in code they have never seen before.
via The 1s and 0s behind cyber warfare | TED