Definitely not malware!

Buzzword dictionary to deal with annoying clients:

AI—regression
Big data—data
Blockchain—database
Algorithm—automated decision-making
Cloud—Internet
Crypto—cryptocurrency
Dark web—Onion service
Data science—statistics done by nonstatisticians
Disruption—competition
Viral—popular
IoT—malware-ready device

Definitely my security teacher. He actually expected us to actively learn the stuff and put effort into our education. He guided us through malware analysis and reverse engineering, simplifying it without insulting us.

We had students who thought they knew everything and he corrected them. We had arrogant students he put in place.

He treated us like adults and expected us to act like adults.

That's the only class I enjoyed studying for, because he would tell us exactly what wasn't on the exams (it was an intro course, didn't need to know the math). There were no trick questions.

I told him about the shitty teacher and he helped me through that confidence block. He helped me realize I *can* make it through the workforce as a female in security because I will work my ass off to be the best I can be. He reminded me why I love computers and why I want to go into forensics.

He's been a great mentor and role model and hiring him is one of the few things my department did right.

Basically like crossing a minefield.

WannaCry Ransomware Execution flow..

So my Cyber Security lecturer was talking about scam emails and how potential hackers can spoof their identity in order to gain information or get some malware on your PC.
Since this was all really obvious, I decided to email him with a crude scam email myself for the lols.
To his credit he saw the funny side.

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

Da Fuck!?!
Yesterday I found some abnormal activity on my server, someone was trying to brute force my ssh as root since two days! Started raging and installed fail2ban (which automatically bans an IP if it fails to log X times and eventually sends me an email). Woke up this morning to find that a fucking Chinese guy/malware spent the whole night trying to brute Force me!
Fucking cunt! Don't you have any better to do!!
My key is a 32 characters long encrypted key, with the ban he can try 3 passwords /2 hours, good luck brute forcing it you bitch!

Scammers mann:
——————————————-
“Hello sir, you have to renew your subscription before tomorrow else you’ll be charged $299.99 from your bank account.”

Me: And what’s this subscription you’re talking?

“Your Microsoft antivirus subscription, sir.”

Me: Oh wow, and when did I subscribe to this?

“Three years ago, sir.”

Me: lmbo. Please find someone else to scam.

“No sir, it shows here that you subscribed to Microsoft antivirus 3 years ago.”

Me: Dude, I was in college three years ago. I was too broke to be subscribing to useless stuff like this.

“But sir, its an antivirus. You subscribed to protect your Windows PC from viruses, malware so that bad people and hackers don’t get into your computer to do bad things and steal your info.”

Me: Well, what a coincidence. You’re describing yourself except you’re trying to attack my bank account not my pc. And oh, I’ve been using Linux for the past 5 years and currently own a MacBook so good luck finding someone to fall for this.

“Oh, I see. Sorry.”

*Scammer hangs up.

Lmbo, like dude seriously?

Unfortunately though, someone at my work mother fell for this and had to close all her accounts and create new ones.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

What seems to be the problem? Oh, is your wordpress site hacked/infected with malware?

So I guess you decided to disable updates because it might break your shitty little site? And I guess you thought those warnings you got from me and multiple colleagues about what could happen when you didn't update your wordpress bullshit weren't that serious?

Hold on, you want *US* to restore *YOUR* hosting backups?

Hahahahahaha-no.

Go clean up your own fucking bullshit. But, before you click that restore button, please take a cactus, carve 'I am a stupid wordpress cunt' into it, dip it in a bathtub of with blood mixed-infected cum and shove it up your ass.

Oh yeah I'm aware that that won't help your situation but it might keep you from reproducing and at least it'll give me some satisfaction.

It's going to be a long day.

When you try to clean up your cousin's laptop.

How do normal people get into situations like these?...

"I'm going to cram you so full of asynchronous JavaScript and malware throttling that your gonna be crapping cipher text" - Simpsons S27E10

Windows: Try Edge! It blocks 13% more malware than Chrome!
Me: Try using your brain! It blocks 99.4% of ALL malware!

*Later*

Windows: Try Edge! It blocks 13% more malware than Chrome!
Me: Edge, you are malware: You are an unwanted piece of software installed without the user's consent, and you make annoying pop-ups.

I don't know what the hell this is, but my idiotic brother downloaded it.

I uninstalled it, but if it's malware, I'll be pissed off.

He literally just came up to me, and said that he clicked a link on YouTube to download something. He even said, "It's an invisible app."

He says it's invisible, because you can't find it unless you check the apps setting.

One comment from @Fast-Nop made me remember something I had promised myself not to. Specifically the USB thing.
So there I was, Lieutenant Jr at a warship (not the one my previous rants refer to), my main duties as navigation officer, and secondary (and unofficial) tech support and all-around "computer guy".
Those of you who don't know what horrors this demonic brand pertains to, I envy you. But I digress. In the ship, we had Ethernet cabling and switches, but no DHCP, no server, not a thing. My proposition was shot down by the CO within 2 minutes. Yet, we had a curious "network". As my fellow... colleagues had invented, we had something akin to token ring, but instead of tokens, we had low-rank personnel running around with USB sticks, and as for "rings", well, anyone could snatch up a USB-carrier and load his data and instructions to the "token". What on earth could go wrong with that system?
What indeed.
We got 1 USB infected with a malware from a nearby ship - I still don't know how. Said malware did the following observable actions(yes, I did some malware analysis - As I said before, I am not paid enough):
- Move the contents on any writeable media to a folder with empty (or space) name on that medium. Windows didn't show that folder, so it became "invisible" - linux/mac showed it just fine
- It created a shortcut on the root folder of said medium, right to the malware. Executing the shortcut executed the malware and opened a new window with the "hidden" folder.
Childishly simple, right? If only you knew. If only you knew the horrors, the loss of faith in humanity (which is really bad when you have access to munitions, explosives and heavy weaponry).
People executed the malware ON PURPOSE. Some actually DISABLED their AV to "access their files". I ran amok for an entire WEEK to try to keep this contained. But... I underestimated the USB-token-ring-whatever protocol's speed and the strength of a user's stupidity. PCs that I cleaned got infected AGAIN within HOURS.
I had to address the CO to order total shutdown, USB and PC turnover to me. I spent the most fun weekend cleaning 20-30 PCs and 9 USBs. What fun!
What fun, morons. Now I'll have nightmares of those days again.

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

Nice try!

!rant
After knocking off from work, I went to nearby Coffee shop to grab a Coffee. I met a girl and we started talking about our day. She asked me to do her a favor and take a look at her laptop, it’s been playing up for sometime now. So, I went. She took me to her bedroom where the laptop was, and the conversation continued on topic romance, sex and girlfriend. You know what happened next…Yes.

For the first time in my life I fixed a hot cheeks computer and got laid.

What was wrong? There was a malware in her computer which was opening random websites.

Regex looks worse than Brainfuck

Why do viruses make computers so slow...? Why can't their programmers implement them efficiently...?

It's like they're trying to be malicious...

I hate Linux so much. I mean, how could anyone of you barbarians like it??

I don't understand the hate for windows. It's secure, emphasizes privacy, and it's Microsoft. What's not to love?

Linux is just proprietary malware.

The most efficient malware distribution system indeed

I'll be buying a second hand Surface tomorrow.

Will put Linux onto it right away, found good instructions on doing that including making the touchscreen work.

If that doesn't work, I'll sell the fucker again because I'm not running windows. I'm just not. That malware can go fuck itself.

Looking forward to transferring that windows machine to a Linux one!

(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).

Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).

Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:

* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.

* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.

* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.

* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.

...and more.

Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.

Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.

I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.

I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.

Antivirus software that believes that client server programs you write are actually malware and quarantine them as soon as you compiled...

Somebody with more technical expertise than me should write a virus that infects pc's but the only impact is that it updates Internet Explorer to the most current version... Call it "honorable malware" 😆

Finally got my phone (oneplus one) screen repaired.

When home, I'll set it up again so I'll finally have a device which isn't integrated within any Google malware/mass surveillance bullshit.

Using a phone with Google services honestly makes me feel uncomfortable 🤢

I recently got a job as a sysadmin and they've been debriefing me on their hacked websites (wordpress malware injection). Beats me why they still have their sites up at all...
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
I wanted to see if they have any backups... NONE.

The latest snapshot was over a year ago...FML. Over a year ago when they barely have anything on their company site and client sites 😒

Now, I have to revive 10 websites from redirection. Time to do some shell scripting!

TRIGGER WARNING: ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Don't mind me just using your computer for bitcoin mining and installing malware on your pc because you didn't block js.

"Thank you for choosing Microsoft!"

No Microsoft, I really didn't choose you. This crappy hardware made you the inevitable, not a choice.

And like hell do I want to run your crappy shit OS. I tried to reset my PC, got all my programs removed (because that's obviously where the errors are, not the OS, right? Certified motherfuckers). Yet the shit still didn't get resolved even after a reset. Installing Windows freshly again, because "I chose this".

Give me a break, Microshaft. If it wasn't for your crappy OS, I would've gone to sleep hours ago. Yet me disabling your shitty telemetry brought this shit upon me, by disabling me to get Insider updates just because I added a registry key and disabled a service. Just how much are you going to force data collection out of your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" users, Microsoft?

Honestly, at this point I think that Microsoft under Ballmer might've been better. Because while Linux was apparently cancer back then, at least this shitty data collection for "a free OS" wasn't yet a thing back then.

My mother still runs Vista, an OS that has since a few months ago reached EOL. Last time she visited me I recommended her to switch to Windows 7, because it looks the same but is better in terms of performance and is still supported. She refused, because it might damage her configurations. Granted, that's probably full of malware but at this point I'm glad she did.

Even Windows 7 has telemetry forcibly enabled at this point. Vista may be unsupported, but at least it didn't fall victim to the current status quo - data mining on every Microshaft OS that's still supported.

Microsoft may have been shady ever since they pursued manufacturers into defaulting to their OS, and GPU manufacturers will probably also have been lobbied into supporting Windows exclusively. But this data mining shit? Not even the Ballmer era was as horrible as this. My mother may not realize it, but she unknowingly avoided it.

Fleksy, if you're going to tell me through a fucking annoying notification that you won't run unless I update Google play services (those can go fuck themselves, I'm not updating that fucking malware) one more goddamn time, I'll fucking exterminate you.

I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

'your good with computers right'?

Me: I work with one every day so I guess...

Can you fix a problem I have with my pc? (relatively old man, and I feel bad for him so I agreed)

Next day he had me fix 4 laptops (from his kids) and a Macbook of his own almost all had shady malware and were WAY behind of their windows updates... Like sub wannacry level...

Rip one of day of my vacation 😠

Ugh, fxk. I got a promotion, I'm now a team lead for 4 developers, and I fxking hate it.

They never asked me if I wanted the position, they just threw me into it this week. They ripped me away from the team I had great chemistry with and put me on this other team with people I have no connection with.

To make matters worse, I'm also responsible for production servers of the clients of this team, one has malware even.

On top of all of this, they made me move desks for a new developer to fill my spot.

How do you demote yourself? Why would a company want someone to perform poorly (on purpose, I don't care) than to just keep their employee happy?

/end rant

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

I programmed a random credit card generator at school and saved it to my :F drive which is the private drive for students to save stuff to. That night I tried accessing my account and it had notified me that it had been locked. I went into school the next day and was called into the office, the principal and Tech Administrator were there waiting for me and asked what the file was. The Tech Administrator tried to describe to me what he found
"This gen.html file seems to be malicious and puts our school at risk. It seems to be some sort of malware and stuff like that is prohibited at school."
Now me sitting in the chair listening to this, laughing in my head just said "okay" and nodded my head because he is the type of person to argue forever. They came to the conclusion to unlock my account by the end of the semester.
Just goes to show that it doesn't take much to get a Tech Admin position at a school.

What is `socially engineered malware` now ?

Linux users can relate 😂😂

How the fuck can this happen?
It might be a malware. I did not do a scan yet, but I guess that it has to do with Google Chrome itself.
I think that a pop up once appeared and ever since I get these windows alerts every 1 hour or something like that.

Malicious Subtitles ?!?!? What's next malware in my coffee ?

Before 10 years, a WordPress site hacked with sql injection. They had access to site, they modified many php files and installed commands to download random malwares from over the internet.

At first I didn't know that it hacked and I was trying to remove any new file from the server. That was happening every 1-2 days for a week.

Then I decided to compare every WordPress file with the official, it was too many files, and I did it manually notepad side notepad!! :/

Then I found about over 50 infected files with the malware code.

Cleaned and finished my job.

No one else knows that I did a lot of hard job.

Fuck npm and the whole npm community!
Seriously, what a piece of completely uncontrolled cat litter!

First experience was getting malware from an npm package which I ranted about a while ago. That it can even happen is beyond my imagination.

Second experience was today when our app broke because a fucker who wrote a library doesn't understand semantic versioning.
If you're gonna publish an npm library, please do the whole fucking world a favour and learn how to version your shit correctly, so my app doesn't break! If you do BREAKING CHANGES don't change the fucking last version number you filthy piece of garbage!

Phew, that felt good 😧

Adylkuzz "saves" users from WannaCry

In fact, because Adylkuzz(malware that mine cryptocurrency) had infected many vulnerable machines long before WannaCry and shut down their SMB port, the malware might have accidentally saved many potential victims from having their data encrypted by WannaCry.

Who the fuck still puts stuff on sourceforge?? Every time I have to download something from there I feel like I'm downloading malware. So many ads and purposefully misleading links, serious developers should avoid it like the plague!

Yesterday, my girlfriend caught a virus. There were 5+ running programs, in program files, program files x86, system32, basically everywhere. The virus modified chrome, firefox, edge (and even installed a false uc browser assuming we had one), there are many entries at startup programs, also running daemons, once you kill one of them, the others detect it and replicate their killed fellows. Tried to run a linux live usb disk for a cleanup, but the computer hibernates instead of shutdown, making modifications on disk risky.

I spent hours trying to suppress the processes, do a manual cleanup and antivirus search. It looked all cleaned up, then I reinstalled chrome, and now it switches its homepage everytime I open it, it also injects batch arguments to desktop link forum chrome (deleting it manually does not help, it comes back). I'm a linux guy, and in a few hours, I hated windows more than ever.

If anybody knows the authors, I *really* want to meet them. I promise I'm not going to punch them, but kneel down, bow my head in respect, and say "teach me master."

Is it illegal to upload a malware(worm) written in python to GitHub? I'm serious :)

I've written a worm which I want to share with my friends (and possible future viewers). My intent is to share my experience. So that they can learn from it. What they are doing with it afterwards, shouldn't be my problem, I guess. (I will put a disclaimer warning in the Readme file of course)

Malware: "HAHAHAHAHA I HAVE HOSED YOUR PC AND REPLACED THE MBR! ONLY I REMAIN!"
me, loading my VM's clean slate snapshot:

So there is a ransomware that after infecting a device checks its geolocation. If the device is in Russia it does not encrypt anything and is harmless.

I wonder which country is this malware from...

i think i've told this story before. but i used to get drunk and download malware just to "fight it".

*opens spam box*
i know what you are bitch!
*swig, hit download*
run you fuker!
*open debugger, swig*

would get too drunk and just nuke my box or vm the next morning but hey

Foday my father argued with me that:
* "HTML programmers" get payed a lot
* WordPress is awesome
* wordpress programmers get payed a lot
* WordPress doesn't need to be secure
* FileMaker is 100% virus-free (probably malware free), because not many people use it
* UX and UI design are exactly the same

Alright, question about graphics cards:

I want to get a six-monitor graphics card.
Currently looking at one but there's a thing:

The visiontek radeon 7750 seems great, manufacturer is AMD.

When searching for images of the *visiontek* radeon 7750 vs the AMD radeon 7750, I get different pictures, according to some product pages the visiontek amd radeon is produced by amd though....

They both have six inputs..

Point is: I'm going to run Linux on it (i refuse to install malware/spyware on my system for obvious reasons) and AMD has native Linux drivers for the radeon 7750: are those also for the visiontek radeon 7750?

I'm lost here. Help!

With the growth of cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud, I feel like the quality of products is going downhill very fast.
Big providers dont care if the customer do stupid things, sends malware, ddos as long as they pay....

I have 40GB of malware. Anyone want some?

First company I worked for, built around 40 websites with Drupal 7...in only a year (don't know if it's a lot for today's standards, but I was one guy doing everything). Of course I didn't have the time to keep updating everything and I continually insisted to the boss that we need more people if we are going to expand. Of course he kept telling me to keep working harder and that I "got this". Well, after a year a couple of websites got defaced, you know the usual stuff if you've been around for some time. Felt pretty bad at the time, it was a similar feeling to having your car stolen or something.

Anyways, fast forward about 2 years, started working on another company, and well...this one was on another level. They had a total of around 40 websites, with about 10 of them being Joomla 1.5 installations (Dear Lord have mercy on my soul(the security vulnerabilities from these websites only, were greater than Spiderman's responsibilities)) and the others where WordPress websites, all that ON A SINGLE VPS, I mean, come on... Websites being defaced on the daily, pharma-hacks everywhere, server exploding from malware queing about 90k of spam emails on the outbox, server downtime for maintenance happening almost weekly, hosting company mailing me on the daily about the next malware detection adventure etc. Other than that, the guy that I was replacing, was not giving a single fuck. He was like, "dude it's all good here, everything works just fine and all you have to do is keep the clients happy and shit". Sometimes, I hate myself for being too caring and responsible back then.

I'm still having nightmares of that place. Both that office and that VPS.

Spammer just called me saying my windows computer was hacked and that I needed his assistance, I agreed and let him download free malware remover tool and other random shit, apparently the terminal commands were not working so he asked what version of Windows I was on, I said XP, and he continued and gave up on the terminal. tried to ruin whatever malware he put on the thing, finally he went to find what version I was running, and found out I was on Linux.

If I could abolish efi I would. Who the fuck needs malware infested roms on their goddamn computer?

Well done HP😀

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

Haha! Sorry but this new cyber attack that's hit the NHS and other company's around the globe, just makes me laugh 😂

These company's just will not spend money on IT, keeping everything update and backed up! 💾

Some of these machines will still running on Windows Vista or XP 😱

So had this virus today...

Doesn't let me install avast.
Doesn't let me run cmd
Closes Firefox everytime I mention the word malware in the search
Closes IE too if I search malware
Mines crypto
Appears out of nowhere even after I surgically remove it with Linux.

I guess I have to reinstall my OS :(

rant || !rant
My father-in-law wants me to buy a new computer for him. He's currently using an old Acer minitower running more malware than real software on shitty Windows Vista. He only uses Email (Outlook 2003), Facebook and Youtube. I'm gonna get him a MSI Cubi Intel N3700/4GB/120GB SSD with Linux Mint and problem solved. No more malware/virus calls from him. I'm installing Mint on Vbox right now and I'm loving it from second 0.

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

F**king kaspersky found "malware" in development tools. Got scared clicked "disinfect"... F**king all days work "disinfected" from my project

Well, either TeraCopy is drunk or I have just copied some malware to the thumb drive.

I've just revived an old desktop computer today. Turns out that it was running Windows XP, Avast free antivirus, and had Bearshare as a default search engine (in other words, that thing is NOT going to be connected to my network).

But, it also had Chrome installed. So I thought to myself, with 1.25GB of RAM, there's no way that it could run Chrome smoothly. Opened it, and....

It consumed 80MB of RAM. 80 MEGABYTES. And that's not even a clean installation of it, it's a (likely) malware-infested one from a user! Compare that to the Chrome of today.

Almost miss seeing these on my parents screens.

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

So... Intense pillowtalk with the wife the other night regarding the coming enforcement of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law in the EU after a while turns into nerdy dirty talk.

Me: *Whisper in a sleazy voice like the dirty malware that I am*: So... Why don't you just open up all your inbound firewall ports for me...
Her: Hell no... But I might just make an exception in the private domain just for you...

We had robotics, or rather an electronics workshop today. Just imagine throwing a bunch of nerds into a room with 3d printers, lots of electronic parts and other tools.

Anyway one of my friends said that his computer wasn't working.

Me: It's running windows so it's broken by default.

Him: common, windows isn't that bad

Me: it is

Our teacher walking by: I'd never want to use windows, it's basically malware

I just sat there smiling 😊

HATE “APPLICATIONS” THAT CHANGE BROWSER SETTINGS.

If you’re a “developer” who has ever created such annoying nonsense - come show me who you are, I want to punch you in the face.

There is a special place in hell for malware coders...

!rant Idea for malware: it launches vim in fullscreen and demands bitcoin in exchange to exit it.

Q: How to be a malware analyst without having a knowledge on x86 ASM?
A: Start learning 32 bit ASM instead.

!rant

Apparently keeping a copy of the malware that infected your server is the equivalent of an evil scientist keeping the experimental creature he was supposed to kill.

I'm an evil scientist, and my response of "it's just misunderdtood" didn't help.

A guy who's parked next to me in the RV asked me today if I know anything about computers. Sure, what's it about?

He has forgotten his password for a Word .doc file, already installed all possible tools for password cracking, but none of them worked, and now
he can't find his vacation photos and surfing the internet suddenly doesn't work anymore.

Okay, no problem, I'll take a look at it. Windows 7 Home Edition, completely covered with malware, everywhere popups with pr0n ads.

I told him that I can't do much more than trying to recover the data and reinstall the OS. But before that, I'll make a image of the hard drive (thank god, only a 250 GB hdd). Then we'll see.

Unfortunately neither he nor I have a Windows DVD, so he will probably become a proud user of Antergos tomorrow.

What to do if client is accusing you for putting some malware in their website?(of course I didn't put anything.....makes 0 sense anyway and btw it's wordpress)
xD

Fuck Microsoft and the windows dev team! Fuck the person who thinks it's a bright idea to force users to download updates on their fucking insecure OS.
I live in a shitty substandard country where the cheapest mobile data plan is roughly $7.5 for 7.2gb for a month.
After several weeks of Windows auto downloading updates I don't need, I disabled the updates on several fronts using tutorials found online until yesterday, the fucking thing still found a way to download updates over 6gb, I didn't suspect a thing until I got notification that my data plan is exhausted and I immediately checked windows update and saw a fucking download meter of 76% downloaded. The data was suppose to last for 4-5 days, all gone within 3 hours span.

Fuck whoever thought it is a nice idea to force users to download shitty updates, leave me with the fucking old unstable version, if I get a malware I know how to find my way out you fucking goofs at microfuckingsoft!!

I booted up windows yesterday night to play some games which is weird for me since I am almost never in the mood

It had to update for like four hours automatically without asking me first so I leave it on and just go to bed

Next day, not really in the mood to play games, as usual

I go to restart into superior distro: Linux

Computer reboots into windows

Try again: fucking windows

Another: malware fills my screen once again

This fucking ass clown overwrote grub

This fucking piece of shit malware deleted my fancy dual boot screen and had the balls to casually say "Hi" while it did it

I then remembered my laptop doesn't have a keyboard combination to select what to boot from. I have to fucking boot my laptop by pressing a pinhole on the side so I can select linux.

Fuck Lenovo with their shitty button and fuck Windows

On the bright side, I guess if anyone steals the laptop they'll never know I have a second OS on it.

What kind of developer are you and what is your opinion on other development areas?

Me: Junior dev, oriented towards full stack and Android(with a sysadmin background):

-Low-level(kernel development, embedded, drivers, operating systems, reverse engineers)- Badass, I wish I could do that.

-Mobile apps- awesome but too high level sometimes.

-Full stack/Backend- awesome.

-Web Frontend- fuck HTML+CSS. JS is cool I guess.

-Enterprise applications(e.g SAP) Pajeet, my son.

-Malware development- Holy shit that is awesome.

-Video Game development- was my dream since childhood.

-Desktop apps- No opinion.

I just logged into my dad's computer and see a bunch of apps running in the background that seems very suspicious and like malware...

He's a developer and he makes like twice what I do...

My mom got infected with one of those stupid you have a virus redirect viruses. Malware bytes isn't useful.
To make matters worse it doesn't redirect in Edge, so she's forced to use Edge until further notice.
It's going to be a long week.

Also I don't have much experience with Windows viruses especially these redirect ones, so yay!

It must really suck to be a malware dev... "Oh look, the recent changes i made to my cryptomalware made it work! Sadly project file are encrypted too. Lets start over."

Asus people!
Time to install some virus scanner 😲
The Asus bloatware software updater was hijacked to install malware.

I just realized that malware developers invest so much time into the UX, that users find downloading and installing malware way easier than downloading and installing the actual piece of software.

Last time client got hacked...we just could not get rid of the malware...it replicated itself short after deletion.

Ended up creating the same files with zero content and setting them read only.

Not clean, but enough to sleep.

Apparently Windows has a very simple mechanism for detecting command line “malware”....

This was a long time ago, when I was working part time in my uni helpdesk. as part of the uni IT service, they offered ISP services at the dorms. It was cheap, and fast. This essentially allowed students living in the dorms to connect thier personal computers to the uni LAN. Then one day...
An ARP poison malware infected some of those computers. An arp poison attack is simple (look at ettercap) - it redirects network traffic via the affected computer, and adds malware to webtraffic to infect more computers. One of these on a network is bad enough, but when there more then one... traffic was redirected a lot. this caused the Dorm switches to collapse under the load. Fun times to work at the helpdesk...
The IT guys came up with a solution for this: they blocked the arp poision attacks at the firewall, and then disabled the switch port for the infected computer for 24 hours. so, when someone called with 'I have no internet!', we told them to bring us the computer, and installed an AV on it.
3-4 month the problem was cleared.

I’ve found a variant of a variant of Mirai in a client’s server, tried to remove it, failed, shut off the server and disconnected it.
The server was our ownership but was situated at the client’s building in their network.
We asked for this server to be in a DMZ segregated from the actual production network just because in the production network there’s the core business as well as credit card data.
They failed to implement our requests and they got hacked.
I hope I discovered the threat in time, but I’m quite sure some head will fall off.
Hell, I’m sorry for those guys but I love my job ❤️
I traced back the malware maker/s and dumped their VPS just because.

So one of my clients got their wordpress site hacked and basically just redirects to scam links and well.. I looked at in the server file manager and their are like three directories with this wordpress site (not clones but the same?) one in the root, a version in a folder called old and another in temp.. with 3 separate wp databases.. DNS entries had malware redirects, the wp-content folder was writable to the public and contained a temp folder with tons of encoded malware and ip links to malicious sites.. there was encoded malware in index.php, has like 20+ plugins, oh and the theme uses a dynamic web builder so the code is basically unreadable in source and scattered.. and the redirects seem to happen randomly or at least on a new session or something. Oh.. and did I mention there are no backups? 😃

"Non-devs never call Steven Spielberg to have their TVs fixed."
But sure they MUST call a dev to update their Android, iPhone, Windows, installation of Anti-virus, data recovery, malware removal, to shortlist 20 laptops from market, ask for what printer to buy, why is there a weird animation in Android sometimes, come borrow my WiFi, have their phones and computers fixed, RIP old audio CDs (yes!), fix Bluray, fix anything electronic, repair their bike, teach them science, politics...
This While True loop never escape.

I just received an email from a weird company they wanted to offer me 150 dollars monthly to insert a script in my google chrome extension, when I asked about the script they sent me a function called "malmare"...
...
Nice...

Well, I helped a client get their website back from being redirected to a microsoft scam website. Even though the restoring process was a nightmare, it feels good to get things working like it was suppose to :)

Just finished setting up PiHole on my RaspberryPi.... no more adblock extensions with shitty performance... no more custom hosts files... and network level adblocking for all devices...
FUCK YEAH

oh, and I added so many lists that it now blocks about 350k domains (ads and malware)

Today was a good day.. time to hibernate...

"Suggest an AV/AM product, Avast refuses to install."

I do malware research as a hobby and have for a while, so I can generally spot when something's up before I even run a program. If i'm unsure about it (or know something's up and wanna see its effects for S&Gs) I throw it into one of a variety of VMs, each with a prepped, clean, standardized "testing" state.

I see no point to AV/AM products, especially as they annoy me more than anything since they can't be told not to reach into and protect VMs (thereby dirtying up my VM state, my research, crashing the VM hypervisor and generally being *really* annoying) and they like to erase samples from a *read-only, MOUNTED* VHDX.

However, normal people need them, so I usually suggest this list:
• MBAM is good and has a (relatively) low memory footprint, but doesn't have free realtime protection.
• Avast is very good as it picks up a lot, but it eats a FUCKTON of resources. It also *really* likes to crash VM hypervisors if it sees anything odd in them.
• AVG is garbage. Kill it with fire.
• Using Windows Defender is like trying to block the rain with an umbrella made of 1-ply toilet paper.
• herdProtect is amazing as it's basically a VirusTotal client but it's web-based and not currently available to be downloaded. (Existing copies still work!)
• Kaspersky. Yes, it spied on US gov't workers. No, they don't care about anyone BUT US gov't workers. Yes, it's pretty good.
• BitDefender: *sees steam game* "Is this ransomware?"

hope this helps

I accidentally let some malware on my computer and it installed drivers so i couldn't delete the reg Keys or the program itself because I didn't have the proper permissions (super administrator account )

I busted out Linux, used a piece of software to open the register, manually deleted the register key entries, because Linux doesn't care what level of admin you are on Windows, he just sudos that shit.

Rebooted, malware gone.

Didn't touch windows for about 8 years and just installing it for the sake playing The Sims 4. Downloading a couple of software and got 100 malware -_-

New malware on the lose.
It encrypts your files.
But with a twist, it unlocks it again if you spread the malware to friends.

Maybe run it in a vm to get the key to unlock your files might work...

This is driving me nuts. Anyone know of this malware or whatever shit it is? Every now and then ads pop up. Usually in the launcher, but sometimes also in other apps. It'd be nice to get rid of... Usually when I look in the activity manager theres nothing, but this time I managed to capture it.

>Wanted to become a hacker because I thought it was cool and fun
>Googled how to become a hacker
>Read a lot of articles
>Talked about it with nerdy friends who ended up helping me with a few resources
>Found Hack Forums
>Stayed on Hack Forums for a while and learnt a lot about malware and hacking and realized I needed to learn how to code to build my own hacking programs
>Got a book from a friend (It was a dev book based on basic)
>Got fascinated with programming and quickly moved on to C++
>Got frustrated with C++ and quit programming for months
>Got introduced to VB.Net and I finally could write codes and development a lot of applications, mainly malware creators and crypters as they were called on HE
>Quit HF and hacking and got into coding seriously and learnt web dev , then java and developing android apps and I have been happy since.

When you accidentally click the wrong download link

I've spend the last 4 hours trying to get this shit out of my system

So flashing microcontrollers gets kinda annoying when you have to simultaneously fight Windows defender's urge to flag the flashing software as Trojan every 30 seconds like a 10 year old kid with ADHD that just discovered coffee.

It doesn't get easier when suddenly only one of three USB ports recognises thumb drives with the current Windows version, and only after two reboots.

Maybe I should just run it in a VM like the three remaining QA testers at Microsoft do, but on the other hand I don't really like the idea of flashing firmware from a VM. Just feels even dirtier.

>80 apps removed from Google Play for being adware but they were trending

Welp... let's get hunting, they'll look nice in my malware collection!

Each time I try firefox after somebody mentions it again or it's in my rss feed, it still seems to never actually advance

It's stuck and either gets worse or goes back to its stable non improving level again, how come do they still not have a proper mobile responsive tester, why are even the upgraded addons still suffering the same container and rendering bugs

how is it more important getting bad image by implementing mr robot malware, than getting on an actual competitive level

why is it default bloated with random pocket addon bullshit, why did it begin to lag, ..

I remember when I was using firefox for a good portion of my life and laughed at how google chrome is laggy, but nowadays theres simply no competition to chrome, its stability and developer tools

I wish there was competition, the grid tools were a great start, but then nothing followed and they just went back to their never improving flatline

Zero Days documentary about stuxnet malware features a "identity protected" NSA employee who reveals information about classified NSA tactics.

She claims "I would NEVER compromise ongoing operations in the field."

Well it's too bad that Amazon Prime Video and IMDB don't share your values. They have compromised your name, Joanne Tucker, and the other films you were in.

Nice acting though. You really have people believing you were a real source!

if that site if malware free, then my ass is purple and none of my code needs to be refactored.

Movie about Stuxnet Cyber weapon is out

The advanced malware used by CIA and MOSSAD to sabotage Iran's nuclear program

"Zero days" by Alex Gibney

Gk watch it guys..

For the last 20 years, there's one thing I've not been able to do reliably:

Share a folder on a windows computer.

Why the fuck can I write /etc/smb.conf from scratch with a blindfold on and make it securely work from all client devices including auth & acl, but when I rightclick and share on windows it's either playing hide and seek on the network (is it hiding behind //hostname/share? No? Maybe in the bushes behind the IP addresses?), or it's protected by mysterious logins requiring you to sacrifice two kittens a day.

Yes, finally it works! One windows update later... aaaand it's gone.

JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING CONF AND A MAN PAGE, MICROSOFT. I DON'T CARE THAT YOU'RE ORALLY PLEASING ALL THESE MALWARE RIDDEN GUISLUTS ON THE SIDE, JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING TEXT FILE TO STORE AND EDIT.

What the fresh hell is this?

Ok seriously is Microsoft mining Bitcoin on my computer? If I leave it idle for >5 minutes it starts using intense amounts of CPU and I have no clue why (doesn't show up in task manager, all the processes added up in taskmgr are like 15% max). It's super annoying since I have a razer and high cpu turns on BOTH VERY LOUD FANS.

I checked for malware and stopped any update or useless background tasks (cortana, indexing, etc) and it has not helped one bit. If I click the screen or move the mouse it subsides immediately.

(No, I won't get a mac--I have two and they lacks compatibility with the software I need as well as the specs for what I usually work with)

A client's site got malware infected, so we decided to remove everything and replace the site with a fresh WordPress installation (very basic site with 4 pages of content).

Contacted iPage live support asking them to check and unsuspend the account (with no files on it), but they kept on insisting that I buy their "firewall" and "SiteLock" services, with zero reply related to suspension. I've had live chat with many other hosting companies, never had such a lousy fucked up conversation. Without providing technical support, they keep marketing their useless expensive services. Fuck you iPage, you just lost a customer.

She turned my software into hardware but left it as malware

Fucking shit for brains authors that think the digital world is a fantasy realm where everything can happen just to aid their story. Out of boredom i watched "scorpion" today, a tv series about a group of geniusses which are a special case task force.
They got a visitor from the government saying the servers from the federal reserve bank were encrypted with ransomware. I already twitched when they said the economic system would collapse if the servers were left inoperational for a few days. Then one guy got to his desk and "hacked" the fed network to check... he then tried to remove the malware but "it changed itself when observed". But they got the magical fingerprint of the device that uploaded it. In the end some non-programmers created the malware, but it is super fast and dangerous because it runs on a quantum computer which makes it hyper fast and dangerous. They got to the quantum computer which was a glowing cube inside another cube with lasers going into it and they had to use mirrors to divert the lasers to slow down that quantum thingy. And be careful with that, otherwise it explodes. In the end the anti-malware battled the malware and won, all in a matter of minutes.

This is a multimillion hollywood production. How can a movie this abusive to computer science even air on television? Shit like this is the reason people still think the cyberworld is some instable thing that can explode any second. It's not, it's an instable thing that can break down any second. I remember "ghost in the wires" and people had surreal imaginations about the internet already. Shit like this is why people stay dumb and think everything can be done in seconds. If i ever should encounter one of these idiots i tell him i have an app that can publish his browser history by taking a picture of his phone and watch his reaction.
Time to shuw down the tv and learn vim again.

There should be a NGO for properly destroying scammers. And I'm not talking about documenting the scams. I'm talking about having the resources to deny them service, find their identities and report them to authorities. Even meddle with their computers using malware.
These people are preying on mostly elderly people and stealing their money.

Celebrate Halloween the *right* way.

(Virus.DOS.Selectronic.1800)

fuck wordpress... Got a request to improve wordpress site speed + pagespeed score. 20-30 plugins, 15 or more additional ones off. Improved the score and noticed that my adblocker is blocking a lot of urls. Sure enough theres a hidden iframe in the bottom with 10 ad network scripts and bidding get requests. Someone is making ad revenue from this shit.. wtf. I've only had problems with shitty wordpress sites being hacked for some reason. It's always a shitty experience. Any tips on fixing hacked wordpress sites?

My first real exposure to a PC was when my father and me built one for myself. Y'know, some AMD Athlon 64, some MSI board, 2 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA 8600 GT, everything was nice.

I never put malware on that thing even though I heavily used it for things like games, I was really cautious with that even when I was like 6 years old (but my father once accidentally did, he killed it by damaging the filesystem on the harddrive which, funny enough, only took the malware with it)
I still have that PC, but it now has weird issues with memory management ;-;

After switching from win to linux, and observing chrome process background behaviour for a while now I can with great certainity say it resembles a malware...

What a day. Teacher told if I can fix few school PCs. Well, quarantined few hundreds of malware and installed Gnu/Linux on one PC just for testing. Only thing left to do is make AutoCAD somehow work and I hope the school can switch from Windows XP to GNU/Linux.

No Avira, the java class file my IDE just created is not a virus...

"moved to quarantine"

Virus Rant: Unwanted folder keep creating itself after deleting it.

Windows Defender detected some malware & cryptominer exist and originated from Chrome folder

Solution: Remove completely Chrome and stick with Microsoft Edge for now!

I cant believe I am removing Chrome and stick with Microsoft Edge.

Lesson learn: please be vigilant at all time.

When you tell someone not to download unauthorised apps on work devices for fear of malware and they do it anyway, and malware appears and they say:

"But I thought apps on the Play Store are safe!"

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

>coding assembly on Windows in 2.017*10^3
>> omw to put "malware analyst specialist" "reverse enginner" on my Twitter bio

Malwares are nasty applications, that can spy on you, use your computer as an attacker or encrypt your files and hold them on ransom.

The reason that malware exists, is because how the file system works. On Windows, everything can access everything. Of course, there are security measures, like needing administrator permissions to edit/delete a file, but they are exploitable.

If the malware is not using an exploit, nothing is there to stop a user from unknowingly clicking the yes button, when an application requests admin rights.

If we want to stop viruses, in the first place, we need to create a new file-sharing system.

Imagine, that every app has a partition, and only that app can access it.

Currently, when you download a Word document, you would go ahead, start up Word, go into the Downloads folder and open the file.

In the new file-sharing system, you would need to click "Send file to Word" in your browser, and the browser would create a copy of the file in a transfer-partition. Then, it would signal to Word, saying "Hey! Here's a file that I sent to you, copy it to your partition please!". After that, Word just copies the file to its own partition, signals "Ok! I'm done!", and then the browser deletes the file from the shared partition.

A little change in the interface, but a huge change in security.

The permission system would be a better UAC. The best way I can describe it is when you install an app on Android. It shows what permission the app wants, and you could choose to install it, or not to.

Replace "install" with "grant" and that's what I imagined.

Of course, there would be blacklisted permissions, that only kernel-level processes have access to, like accessing all of the partitions, modifying applications, etc.

What do you think?

So I google for a dll editor, and download the first result, don't scan it because I'm tired, and next thing I know I have 370 unwanted items on my laptop. Why is the first result on google an adware dropper...

Prevention from malware is a lot like prevention from burglars...

As long as you don't have windows, you're good to go!

So i got a rootkit today...

I really don't get why creators of already-suspicious looking software (and the related suspicious looking website) put terms like "NO VIRUS" or "100% free of malware" next to the download area.

I mean, why would that help anything?

(I understand those typical virustotal scan widgets though, those are fine)

My first job was writing a cloud based malware analysis system from scratch for UTSA's Institute for Cyber Security.

My direct supervisor was a womanizing, lazy, prick with a PHD. I wonder where he is now.

I just realized something, they put a lot of ads and viruses on porn sites because they were so horny, they didn't even think of the consequences opening the sites

*Mind Blown*
Yes Im a bit slow on this...

I write JavaScript and C#. Like an author. Now and then I send my work for review so it can be published.... If I start telling people that instead of saying I am a developer maybe they will stop nagging me about their printers and shitty malware-loaded computers.

There's two types of people in this world, those who don't like regex, and magical otherworldly beings, luckily for me, I'm the latter

When older family members have entire notebooks dedicated to logging obscure, easily-hackable passwords, but then download any app in the world that promises to "make your phone run like new!" (by using 30MB more RAM on God-knows how much malware)
We aren't doing a good job of educating people if anyone we know can fall victim to those kinds of hackneyed procedures and snake-oil apps. It's almost painful to watch, and have to be the bad guy by telling someone dear to me they've been making things worse for themselves because of a seemingly harmless app that they were almost proud of.

Thank you Google, for updating Chrome on my phone without notice in spite of me explicitly disabling automatic updates and me 'not having enough storage space left' for manual updates. It's nice to see you caring about the user so much.
Now if you sucked my dick while you were at it, that would be great.

I wrote a parody of Sound of Silence based on the struggles of cleaning up people's shit in the shop

============

Hello problems, my old friends
I've come to talk with you again
Because a driver softly creeping
Left its seeds while RAM was leaking
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of crashing

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow bands of networking
'Neath the halo of a burned-out fan
I turned my collar to the hot and spinning
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of an LED light
That split the night
And touched the sound of crashing

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand tasks, maybe more
Programs malloc with no swap
Programs writing with no space
Programs writing bits that voices never play
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of crashing

"Fools, " said I, "You do not know
Malware, like a plague, it grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my tools that I might help you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells, of crashing

And the programs bowed and prayed
To the malware god they made
And Windows flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And Windows said, "The words of the prophets are written in the event log
And dumped over COM"
And whispered in the sounds of crashing

Ehh.....
Another day of problems with Windows, just removed 96 unsafe files (Trojans, Malware, Adware etc.)...
At first, Defender refused to work with me, I tried to remove that with Defender (which found just 7 treats), but 'remove' or 'quarantine' didn't work, so I downloaded Malwarebytes and now works fine. Still, some minor problems, gonna format this crap soon...or maybe it's time to move to Linux or macOS finally? 🤔

I grabbed 30 random DOS malware samples from my collection, rolled via urand over Python list, and tried to figure out how they work.

Results:

1x zipped EICAR
4x working but effectively useless ("yeah you wiped the first 100 sectors of the drive... but you wrote their prior contents. Literally nothing's changed...")
10x CPU hang
10x crashdump back to DOS
5x crashdump back to DOS but ERRORLEVEL=0 so normal termination despite real errors being given?

also make sure SOURCER is disassembling using 486 or Pentium opcodes or it misses some 286/386 opcodes and will count half the program as data.

Why do windows users keep installing those bloated anti viruses and firewalls that just slow the hack of their system when windows essentials is enough with near to no impact

Those are the same people that got their system full with malware

When you scan an old system you found in the attic.

Was checking what my coworker was up to. He was given a computer to fix by another coworker and the PC belonged to his child.

”Oh I just uninstalled Steam. It’s a bad software with loads of viruses that slow down your computer!”

I remember that my granddad and I built a computer with old crappy hardware that we disassembled from other computers.
I mostly used it for playing games like Age of Empires or Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I really don't remember a lot about but I remember I also had internet. Never got any Malware tho haha.

Then sometime my friend came over and he showed me a website named "Scratch". We made a lot of crappy games and a cat that farts when you press a button.

So yeah I instantly fell in love and did a lot of "Scratch"-ing with my brother.

That's was the time I found my love for programming.

I think about 2 years later I got a MacBook (the old from my father) and finally started with real programming!

Now, after 6 years I have an awesome little ZenBook and am programming everyday.
Love it!

Progress...

Friendly reminder to trim your services list with msconfig if using Windows. Services that are STOPPED are not DISABLED, and they can be brought back up when just stopped, sometimes remotely.

(This reduces chances of being bitten by malware that uses the Fax service or similar, as there are a few that have in past used often-unused services to propagate. It also reclaims a small bit of memory, and the more real memory you have, the less you page out when compiling or similar, which is slow as fuck.)

also for the love of god stop using RDP and use something that's more penetration-proof than a paper plate...

Just saw an article on facebook about client side form validation with js.
It had just one example:
<code>
function checkInput()//called with onClick on send button
username = document.getElentByID("username");
password = document.getElentByID("password");

if(username == ""){
alert("Username cannot be empty");
return;
}
if(password == ""){
alert("Password cannot be empty");
return;
}
this.form.send();
</code>
I recommended using <input [...] required="required">

The site it linked to had about 7 ads (I got redirected to "your phone has been infected" kibd of malware site twice) and a pop-up requireing you to sign up to their newsletter to see the article.

Low-end smartphones sold to Americans with low-income via a government-subsidized program contain unremovable malware, security firm Malware bytes said in a report.

According to the report of ZdNet: The smartphone model is Unimax (UMX) U686CL, a low-end Android-based smartphone made in China and sold by Assurance Wireless. The telco sells cell phones part of a government program that subsidizes phone service for low-income Americans. "In late 2019, we saw several complaints in our support system from users with a government-issued phone reporting that some of its pre-installed apps were malicious," Malwarebytes said in a report. The company said it purchased a UMX U686CL smartphone and analyzed it to confirm the reports it was receiving.

Best way to start a new year? Force deleting all the malware my dad has somehow accumulated in his laptop...

That moment you start your experiment environment and suddenly have 5 windowses on two linux machines.

This somehow feels so wrong. Like having malware on my maschines 😲

I think I gonna hang myself.

So my endpoint management has started flagging up tiktok as containing malware, specifically hiddad.b can anyone confirm this? Anyone got a decent antivirus on their android ?

Fuck the ISP and the incompetent retarded developers in the government!

The retarded ISP is injecting malware ads on all web pages which means if you access a non HTTPS site, you're gonna get fucked.

And the retarded government site still do not have HTTPS version for the websites!

The biggest irony is that this particular government site is for developers to register for courses ( paid ) about latest technologies.

I'm on the verge of breaking this shit Windows based work laptop (Dell, so called i5, yes it's outdated but still) with idk what.
15 and a half mins since bootup and I've not been able to access Microsoft Outlook.

You domt wannacry for your data later

Time it took me to write REST API and DB objects = 20 mins

Time it took me to to write a shitty Python 15-line script that parses a text file with regex's = 2 hours after I asked Stackoverflow

Don't even know what to say.

Best part of being a dev?

Fixing everyone's printer, malware, and Windows update issues. Love that!

I am trying to install eclipse for college

Windows defender blocked it because it found malware virus in it

Disabled windows defender

Waste my time to download again

Kaspersky blocked it because it found multiple trojans

Kaspersky saved my computer over 30 times from real damaging viruses

Disable kaspersky too

Waste my time squared download eclipse again

Open eclipse

Import tomcat v8

Eclipse crashes

In college doing A2’s, working solo. Building a companion app for Trivial Pursuit bet you know it edition. Laptop got hit by virus/malware, stopped me from copying files, lost 2/3’s of my project 3 days before submission.

FUCK you "WP iThemes Security Pro".

First of all, your FUCKing services isn't really secure, more like security by obscurity.
Don't get me started on how you probably don't have a dedicated team of security experts.
But oh well, the customer insisted I must install you, despite my advise.

Second of all, Don't FUCKing send me emails regarding "Scheduled malware scan failed" without it containing the FUCKing error message, not some generic "http_request_failed" error, why did it FUCKing fail?

Last but not least: Don't FUCKing clutter is with with your giant ass logo that takes up half my screen or FUCKing spam such as your upcoming events, newly published books/articles, incorrect "documentation"

Whelp, I made the switch to android about a week ago. Didn't go two days without getting malware on it. I only browse hacker news and used devRant, standard messaging app, no root, so no shady things, just fairly standard things besides devRant. When I called Samsung support, they said it was a known issue and sent me some links to some forums where people were having the same issues. After digging through those threads, there was an official answer from Samsung saying they weren't going to fix the issue (at least in any foreseeable future). That's unacceptable for a phone that was released less than a year ago.

I'm done with Samsung phones for good. I might come back to Android on a google phone.

I hate how Android is distributed and the manufacturers don't take ownership of their issues. They just work on the new phone without caring for anything older than 6 months. If I had to get a new phone every time a major security issue was found and the company refused to fix it, I'd spend more money than on an iPhone.

It seems like Google keeps their devices up to date better, presumably because they have better control of OS releases. But non-google Android devices are dead to me.

Back to my iPhone for now...

🎵sad Charlie Brown music🎵

People keep telling me that fullstack/web/mobile isn't real programming, and only "heavy" stuff like OS/Performence/libraries & SDK/Malware is "real".

I think they are just assholes. But these stuff are cooler than building a CRUD app.

What do you think?

There were two of them, not sure which was completed first. One was malware, the second one -- admin tool.

These were the early XP days

1. A batch [windows] script to ease system users' mgmt. Nothing fancy, just multiple calls to usercontrol. My dad needed it for work, and there, it was born. To extend further I made it into an exe file w/ some icon. I felt very proud of it :)

2. I have already told a story of this one at dR. Anyway, it was also a batch script. Except that it was more advanced. Basicaly it was a trojan. Once executed it discovered all that computer's ip addresses and uploaded them to an ftp. Then - pulled a headless radmin installation and initiated a silent install of radmin server. Added radmin server's executable to autolaunch list so that it would come up after reboots. Once done - uploaded SUCCESS status to my ftp. And then all I had left to do - pick an ip from my ftp and enter it into radmin client's CONNECT window. I had a full controll of over a dozen of pcs