The word “malware” is relatively modern, and it emerged from the need to place multiple malicious variants under a common description. Today's malware tries to steal data or blackmail the user (among other things), but in the '80s and '90s, the role of these programs was very different. Some presented themselves as simple pranks, while others carried animations or political messages. The Malware Museum at the Internet Archive lets us explore several historical malware examples, with no risk at all to our systems.
I still perfectly remember the media frenzy around the appearance of the Michelangelo virus. Newscasts talked about a wave of chaos and destruction that would affect millions of computers, erasing data and causing millions of dollars in losses... but in the end, it was calculated that the most serious cases didn't surpass 20,000 worldwide.
The Michelangelo virus was a variant of the classic Stoned virus, whose original version demanded the legalization of marijuana without causing any damage to the computer. That's the main difference between malware then and now. Although they often had a destructive component, the old viruses carried jokes, messages, and even animations.
The Malware Museum: Classic Malware One Click Away
It's still possible to find samples that work perfectly under MS-DOS environments, but if you want to see them without having to do that work, the Internet Archive offers The Malware Museum. There you'll see a total of 82 entries with different .com files that reproduce the messages and animations of certain viruses. All of these environments are based on DOSBox, and as expected, any harmful aspect of each virus has been completely neutralized.
Two of the viruses featured there are “Coffeeshop”, which shows a huge cannabis leaf on screen (coffee shops in the Netherlands can legally sell cannabis, up to a certain point), and the “Casino” virus, in which an infected user bet their disk's FAT on a slot machine.
Some of these specimens will probably steal a smile, but others still cause fear even after all these years... and after being disabled. The Internet Archive doesn't seem to have expanded this museum much, but we definitely want it to. There are many classic viruses that, despite their original harmfulness, deserve to be preserved.
Official site: Click here
