Over 6 years ago I decided to pursue yet another silly idea: extract all the unique .ico files from PE resources from as many samples as I can. This exercise yielded ~450K unique .ico files. If I remember correctly, the original idea was that I may somehow leverage them in my research & detection efforts (yara, malware family clustering, etc.), but when I came across this old, sad folder today it quickly dawned on me that I am quite good at extracting meaningful data, but even better at forgetting about it.
Calculating the number of all .ico files I gathered in that folder quickly lead me to an astonishing discovery: the total number of all files is very close to a square root of (NUMBER_OF_THE_BEAST+1). Using a quick & dirty Python script I borrowed from StackOverflow I have created a PNG file that exposes the results of this old work to the world. Using a sophisticated algorithm that reads the .ico file, resamples it to 16×16 square and appends it to the final picture, I was able to build this final, iconic, 200MB in size, PNG file:
iconic.png (667 x 667)
I do not claim any copyright.