An art patron has paid $1.3 million for the tech equivalent of a dormant land mine: a 2008 Samsung laptop containing some of the world’s mot destructive malware. The company supplied the malware and collaborated with Guo to guard against the kind of real-world damage the project was designed to highlight. “We have this fantasy that things that happen in computers can’t actually affect us, but this is absurd,” Guo told The Verge. The laptop is air-gapped, meaning it’s not directly connected to the Internet and cannot spread the viruses to other networks. Malware includes viruses, worms, spyware, ransomware and other malicious code designed to extract personal information or inflict damage.

Source: National Post May 31, 2019 13:30 UTC