A malware written for research and educational puposes. Not intended to do any harm to any individual.
I wrote Animus years ago to extend my knowledge about automation of unsupervised systems. Writing a research malware seemed like a pretty good way to dive into that topic.
To my knowledge, Animus has never been used in the wild. The project doesn't contain any precompiled binaries. Until recently, the project didn't have a license file attached (assuming all rights reserved). In hindsight, omitting the license wasn't a good decision, since malicious actors couldn't care less about the license, while research on the project could have been actively hindered by that.
Because of that, the project recently adopted the Hippocratic license, which allows benign entities to use the code for good.