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Relive the Internet's Wild West Days at the Malware Museum

The Malware Museum is a large archive of 80’s and 90’s computer viruses removed of their nightmarishly destructive capabilities.
Malware Example: CRASH.COM

The days when pernicious malware ran rampant through the computers of young, wide-eyed internet users are in the past, but online security expert Mikko Hyppönen and technology archivist Jason Scott have brought a revival of this nostalgic era to their latest project, The Malware Museum.

As part of The Internet Archive, an online library of countless digitized materials, the museum presents the same viruses that plagued online existence during the 80s and 90s in an organized, archival format for your emulated enjoyment.

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Hyppönen, who has studied and collected viruses for over 20 years, tells us that he has “rendered them harmless by reverse engineering the malware to understand what it does and then overwriting the malicious parts with NOP (no-operation) commands.” In other words, the viruses have effectively been "de-fanged," and now serve an aesthetic and informative purpose without the associated inability to boot your computer.

Malware Example: Q WALKER.COM

Malware Example: HYMN.COM

Although they were stripped of their potency, Scott believes that this was perhaps an unnecessary precaution and had considered uploading full-strength, dated malware as part of the museum. “I believe, extremely strongly, that we could actually put up ‘fanged’ viruses pretty easily and they’d still be harmless,” Scott states. “But in some ways, the point was more effectively made with less than 100 of them—any more and they'd be just washing over a potential audience. Plus, many viruses are not particularly nice or creative (in the artistic sense), so you'd see, maybe, a message or nothing at all, while they "ran."

Malware Example: MARS G.COM

Malware Example: LSD.COM

Beyond the comprehensive display of viruses, the Malware Museum also presents a more educative side. Video recordings of lectures and presentations on the history and culture surrounding viruses are also included within the museum limits, and for the truly enthused, academic papers and essays by Hyppönen that theorize on the behavior of malware are also available for viewing.

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The Malware Museum is on indefinite display at The Internet Archive. Visit Mikko Hyppönen’s website and Jason Scott’s blog & ASCII archive here.

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