The ‘world’s most dangerous’ laptop goes up for auction, fetches over $1.2 million bid

Auctions are usually held for rare art pieces or vintage items. But someone wants to auction off what would be the most ‘dangerous’ laptop in the world. ‘The Persistence of Chaos’ is a laptop with six viruses that can cause financial damages up to $95 billion. The auction for The Persistence of Chaos is currently live with four more hours remaining. At the time of writing this story, the highest bid was running at $1.2 million. This ‘piece of art’ is a 2008 Samsung NC10 laptop with 14GB storage running on Windows XP SP3. It is filled with six different malware including the infamous ‘WannaCry’ which affected over 200,000 computers globally. It also caused the NHS in the UK up to $4 billion financial damages. More viruses include ‘ILOVEYOU’ which spread through emails and file sharing. This virus led to damages up to $5.5 billion in just the first week of its attack. ‘DarkTequila’ which targeted users in Latin America stole sensitive information like bank details and corporate data. The virus worked even when servers went offline. The Persistence of Chaos is the work of internet artist, Guo O Dong who developed it with cybersecurity company, Deep Instinct. The reason behind creating this product was to make people aware that such viruses can have physical impact as well. “We have this fantasy that things that happen in computers can’t actually affect us, but this is absurd. Weaponized viruses that affect power grids or public infrastructure can cause direct harm,” Guo O Dong was quoted by The Verge as saying. The laptop will be available for shipping from New York once the bidding ends. The auction website also states that this laptop can only be used for “academic reasons” because of obvious reasons of spreading malware being a crime. Source: Hindustan Times