Why Use Pasture?
Why Collect Malware?
For a short answer, look at this xkcd web comic and why collect computer viruses?. More seriously, collecting malware can be useful in creating software which defends against it. David Dagon and Paul Vixie's paper on AV Evasion Through Malicious Generative Programs and David Dagon's Malware Repository Update slides provide extremely insightful views on serious malware collecting.
Why Use Pasture?
Most other methods of managing malware collections involve a lot of human interaction. This is because the collections need to be "weeded" of various material which a collector is not interested in for whatever reason, and then organized in a logical manner. This can be very time consuming, especially when collectors trade data back and forth and people preferring to collect only certain types of data or seeing their data in a certain way. Pasture automates as much of this as possible, so users can focus on collecting samples rather than organization.
