theverge:
THE MALWARE MUSEUM SHOWS THE CUTE COMPUTER VIRUSES OF…
THE MALWARE MUSEUM SHOWS THE CUTE COMPUTER VIRUSES OF THE PAST
The creators of the viruses of the past often set out to destroy computers, and trumpeted their activities with garish splash screens, showing scrambled code, animated pot leaves, or laughing skulls.
The vast majority of these viruses are gone now, the security holes they exploited patched out of existence by Microsoft or by the inexorable march of time making the very machines they worked on obsolete, but a new collection on the Internet Archive allows us to get a glimpse at an important part of computer history. The Malware Museum is an online collection put together by Mikko Hermanni Hyppönen, chief resource officer at Finnish security firm F-secure, featuring emulated versions of a number of MS-DOS viruses from the 1980s and 1990s.
Visitors can download defanged versions of the viruses in question, each of which has had the destructive bit of code at its core removed, leaving only the visual effects.
Back during the 80s and 90s virus coders were anarchists and graffiti artists, spraying colours over your screen while they ripped apart your hard drive and destroyed. These days viruses are largely boring corporate tools for extracting cash, processor power, or just a connection for a DDOS from unsuspecting downloaders…
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THE MALWARE MUSEUM SHOWS THE CUTE COMPUTER VIRUSES OF… appeared first on CJMoseley.co.uk.
