CAUTION : THIS IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE
I think we should download malware, computer worm, and malicious software for study because if we know how it was made, we will aslo know the
way to erase them. I have actually downloaded spyware to my laptop for study purpose, if anything screwed up i can always re-install OS.
*Doing this is not recommended but it is still challenging and exciting. If anyone want to join me...Great
You may find a few Lemmings that will follow you down that road, but little else probably.
You should really be employing some decent tools for backup and containment when testing malwares.
Here I run malware in a sandbox and or virtual machine with the real system in virtual mode through Returnil as well.
I've ran/tested heaps of malware in the above setups without a breach as yet but I still have ghost images and clones on spare hard drives as backups, just in case.
Just don't become one of those that inadvertently ends up sending malware all around the web, because you didn't contain it correctly.
From what I've seen (which isn't that much) analyzing malware behaviour can be a fairly complex task.
I hope that as a minimum, you know how to write some code, and are familiar with a hex editor.