Take a Trip to the Malware Museum

I’m sure many of you have been to a museum at one point or another but did you know there was also a museum for Malware? That’s right, there’s a huge online collection of things that want to ruin your computer, and no, I’m not just talking about that “download more RAM” banner. Don’t worry, though, as this museum isn’t going to leave you with a wildly virus infected computer, it’s actually run by Archive.org and is more an art exhibition that a pit of doom that will wipe your hard drives.

Most people have heard of malware, most of you have likely suffered at the hand of it too, but there’s also a little artistic beauty to many of these bits of malicious software of days gone by. The exhibition was put together by online security expert Mikko Hypponen, and offers a visual collection of old-school viruses and the often creative visual effects, ascii art and more that they use to use to effectively troll their victims. It’s certainly a colourful display too, and you can see them in action in all their glory.

There are some pretty cool animations in there too, it’s not just blocks of text or pop ups like you would expect from modern spam-centric viruses. If anything, I’d say the hackers of the past were far more creative and more often than not were just out to demonstrate their skills and cause destruction, rather than be financially motivated; not that this makes what they did any better for the user of course.

So what are you waiting for? Take a trip back to the days of MS-DOS and floppy discs, screen saver viruses and more and who knows, maybe you’ll learn a bit of computer history while you’re at it.

View the full gallery at Archive.org.