Casino virus

It was called the Casino virus. If it infected your machine, it would remove all files from your hard drive and challenge you to a game. "I'm giving you a last chance to restore your precious data," it would say. "Your data depends on a game of Jackpot."

It presented a kind of digital slot machine, and you had just five chances to spin those digital wheels and land on three matching monochrome icons. If you didn't, Casino berated you with shockingly salty language before deleting your data forever. "You asshole," it would bark. "Say bye to your balls"

This rather naughty piece of software spread through the computer world in the late s before the rise of the mainstream Internet, traveling from machine to machine on floppy disks passed from one human hand to another. If it ever landed on your DOS machine and commandeered your monochrome monitor, you know just how thrilling a virus could be in those days. Nowadays, viruses never play games. They never talk like teenage boys. They never talk at all. They steal your identity without saying a word. "The old viruses were more like supervillains than terrorists," says computer historian Jason Scott.

Sadly, some people never experienced the thrill of a virus like Casino. But now they can. It's one of many classic viruses now available at the Malware Museum, the latest digital time warp from Jason Scott, our pre-Internet archivist-in-chief. "The Casino virus is legendary. I heard about it my teens," Scott says. "Now, I have my hands on it."

Making History

In the late '90s, Scott created a public archive of his old online bulletin board messagesall his modem-powered online chatter with other lonely guys before any of them could get on the Internetand soon, he was inundated by online bulletin board messages from around the globe. Eventually, he had a bona fide bulletin board museumpraise the Lord!and over the years, this expanded into all sorts of other lost digital goodies, including audio files and ads and GeoCities pages andthank God!AOL CD-ROMs. People tend to send him their digital past. And he happily curates it for the edification and enjoyment of generations future.

It's the most human of endeavors. History is important to humans. And this is history. "There was Haight-Ashbury in the '60s, and there were bulletin boards in the '80s," Scott once told us.

There were also viruses in the 80s. And at about 2 in the morning this past Friday, Scott and his Archive Team ventured into in this rich realm for the first time. Much of the Malware Museum comes from the personal archives of Mikko Hypponen, the chief research scientist at venerable anti-virus company F-Secure. At F-Secure, Hypponen has been catching malware since , and he still had many of his earliest finds sitting on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies. A few days ago, Hypponen sent several to Scott. Scott didn't respond. But on Friday, Hypponen awoke to find them on the Internet. He was quite pleased. "Casino is my favorite too," he says.