Malware Museum
After the advent of computer systems and related technology, human diseases ceased to be the only contagious and deadly infections plaguing us. Computer viruses have cost us labour hours, money, and privacy. The earliest ones began to crop up in the 1970s; the “Creeper Worm” is largely accepted as the first self-replicating program that spread through the ARPANET (the foundation on which the internet was built).
While most computer viruses created today are malicious in their intent, many coders in the 1980s and 1990s sought to creatively express themselves or disseminate messages through viruses spread on the MS-DOS system. Mikko Hypponen, a computer security expert, put together a large collection of interesting malware that now, devoid of any destructive potential, could be safely viewed and admired for their ingenuity, cheek, and imagination.
About the Scholar
Mikko Hypponen is a computer security expert in Finland. He is the Chief Research Officer for F-Secure, a global cyber security company. He has worked on many of the worst computer virus outbreaks in history. In 2010 he worked on the Stuxnet computer worm which was responsible for damaging parts of Iran’s nuclear program. He is also interested in viruses from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly how they were often created by ‘happy hackers’ and not by organised groups with malicious intent. Many of the viruses in the Malware Museum archive come from his personal collection, while others were put together by Jason Scott, an archivist with the Internet Archive.
