AmiGuard Calls for Original Infected Amiga Floppies to Preserve and Detect Historical Malware

Open-source antivirus project AmiGuard is appealing to the Amiga community for vintage infected floppy disk images and virus samples to document and detect historical Amiga malware.

An unusual preservation effort is asking Amiga enthusiasts to help save something most computer owners once desperately wanted destroyed: authentic Amiga malware. AmiGuard, an open-source antivirus project supporting AmigaOS and Kickstart 1.2 or later, issued a community request highlighted on 8 September seeking genuine historical Amiga viruses, Trojans, infected floppy-disk images and other malicious samples. The objective is not to redistribute malware casually but to expand AmiGuard's ability to recognise and classify threats that circulated during the platform's commercial era. The project is particularly interested in original infected ADF disk images, Amiga HUNK executables, boot blocks and material recovered from old bulletin-board-system archives, magazine collections and private disk libraries. Submitted samples are intended to go through an isolated analysis process involving static examination, manual review, verification in an appropriate Amiga environment and subsequent classification before detection signatures are incorporated. AmiGuard itself is released as open-source software under the MIT licence. The request illustrates an underappreciated aspect of software preservation. Viruses are undesirable software, but historically important malicious programs are still software artefacts. The Amiga developed one of the earliest substantial home-computer virus ecosystems during the late 1980s. The SCA virus, generally dated to 1987, became particularly famous for spreading through floppy boot blocks and displaying its memorable message after a certain number of infections. Other families followed as disk swapping, public-domain libraries and the demoscene enabled programs to travel rapidly between otherwise unconnected machines. Contemporary antivirus utilities became part of everyday computing for many Amiga users as a result. Preserving those samples allows modern researchers to understand how malware operated under a very different hardware and operating-system model, while developers of contemporary Amiga security tools can test against actual threats rather than incomplete descriptions. There is also a practical reason. Vintage collectors frequently acquire boxes containing hundreds of unknown floppy disks, some of which may have remained untouched since the 1980s or 1990s. An actively maintained scanner capable of identifying historically accurate infections remains useful when imaging and cataloguing those collections. AmiGuard's appeal should naturally be handled carefully: suspicious software belongs in controlled analysis environments rather than casually executed on valuable vintage systems. From a preservation perspective, however, today's call recognises an important truth. Saving computer history means preserving not only the software people loved, but occasionally the software they absolutely hated.