In May 2019 there was an unusual on-line tech auction ......
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| Dangerous Laptop |
.... in which a 2008 Samsung NC10 Windows Laptop was sold for £1m ($1,286,540.00) to an undisclosed/unknown buyer.
So what made this WindowsXP laptop so valuable? It was infested with 6 of the most notorious computer viruses of the era, ILOVEYOU, MyDoom, SoBig, DarkTequila, BlackEnergy, and WannaCry. The laptop was actually a work of art called The Persistence of Chaos and was actually created by artist Guo O Dong in collaboration with NY cyber security firm Deep Instinct.The viruses are still potent even though designed and created for XP (which one would hope is not used by 99.999% of computer users on-line today), so as a precaution, the laptops ports and Internet capabilities were purposelessly permanently disabled .... the artist described it as "a kind of bestiary."
The reason for the interest being such that it drove the price to that was not fully discerned, but possibly someone wanted to research the viruses.
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